The restaurant that relies on the micro oyster beds to help the ecosystem

At A'Riccione in Milan, in the historic restaurant on Via Taramelli, oysters are not a recent fashion: they have been on the menu since the 1960s. For years, however, for many customers the vocabulary stopped at two names, two varieties - Fin de Claire and Belon - linked to the imagination of the French Riviera. It was at the end of the 1990s, when they took over the restaurant, that Dante and Giuseppe Di Paolo grasped the intuition: to move the oyster from a niche product to a category to be told, distinguishing quality, types and territories. A choice that, over time, became a lever to build expertise and, in the long run, a micro-industry.

The training starts in the field through trips to different countries: Normandy and Brittany, the Mediterranean and Portugal, to the Atlantic sites. From these explorations, Di Paolo returns with a clear idea of the production logic behind oyster farming: "The sea does it all, you just have to learn how to contain it," explains Giuseppe Di Paolo, who emphasises that oyster farming is more about managing the environment: "The oyster does not require feed and filters what it finds in the water," he explains. The variable that returns everywhere, however, is the tide: where there is high tide and low tide, the oyster grows stronger; where it is lacking, they try to recreate it with mechanical and floating systems.

After several inspections also in Italia, Di Paolo identified a recurring criterion: the exchange between fresh and salt water, with currents and springs. And in the end the operational choice fell on an Irish bay about an hour from Dublin: 'There,' he says, 'the water temperature conditions were better than elsewhere, even compared to France.

In a short time, the project becomes a remotely managed 'tailor-made' micro-fishing factory: not a plant owned, but a quota cultivated by a local oyster farmer according to an agreed protocol, with periodic checks. "The system combines a few (bags) and steel cables stretched between poles in the sea, laid at a height of about one metre to one and a half metres," he says, "where these bags are stretched horizontally, so as to intercept tides and wave motion and transform natural energy into continuous rotation.

The Irish production that ends up on the tables of the Di Paolo's three Milanese restaurants - in addition to the one in Via Taramelli, there is also another in Via Procaccini and one in Via Durini - is about a thousand a week, about 50,000 pieces a year. But around the corner there is always the shadow of biological risk: 'More than 50-60% of the production is lost along the way and it takes about 2-3 years to reach a commercial size, depending on the water temperature,' Di Paolo points out. For this reason, the entrepreneur points out, it is not a business with a certain return, precisely because there are many unforeseen events. But the advantage is also tangible on the environment. Here, in fact, sustainability stops being an abstract concept and becomes a supply chain issue. Di Paolo confirms this: "The oyster is like the mussel: it helps the ecosystem because it filters CO2 and transforms it into oxygen, and this farming has made that bay more sustainable by helping the marine ecosystem and that of the delta.