Kajillions of Oysters Sold Weekly; Fish Fry Saved by Compost Power Couple

KEY POINTS

•Maeve and Rory McAuliffe, siblings and owners of Rory's Place, serve local fish and chips every Wednesday in Ojai, California.
•They source fresh halibut from Ventura and compost every scrap to support local farms in a sustainable nutrient cycle.
•The restaurant sells about 2,000 oysters weekly, while steak scraps are given to local ranchers for pig feed and compost.

Every Wednesday, Rory’s Place in Ojai, CA turns into the holy land of halibut, serving a fish and chips so local it likely knows your mailman. Siblings Maeve and Rory McAuliffe—a duo seemingly auditioning for Sustainability Superheroes—treat every halibut carcass like royalty by transforming it into fumet, aka fish stock with culinary jazz hands. Fries get pampered over two days with blanching before joining a beer batter described as an 'effervescent pancake mix,' because normal batter is too basic. They also shill a wood-fired roasted cabbage drenched in silky pumpkin sauce to prove vegetables can be sexy. Meanwhile, the McAuliffes collect scraps so obsessively that hanger steak trimmings find a second career 'feeding pigs and enriching soil' in a nutrient cycle even NASA would envy. Oh, and they sell about 2,000 oysters a week—because apparently bivalves are the new black.