Since leaving behind her career in travel management, Virginia Shaffer has made a name for herself in the oyster world. Her Phippsburg-based oyster culinary tour company, Lady Oyster Tours & Tastings, was awarded “Best Rural Culinary Heritage Experience” in 2025 by the World Food Travel Association, and the Maine Office of Tourism’s Rising Star award in 2026. In May, she launched The Parlor in Bath, which she calls “Maine’s smallest oyster bar.”

Shaffer is also a food writer and certified oyster sommelier. Her new book, “Oyster Society: Adventures with the Shellfishly Motivated,” grew out of her 10-year-old Lady Oyster blog. It’s billed as a memoir, but reads more like an oyster-centric travelogue, with much of its focus on the oyster farmers, shuckers, researchers and entrepreneurs she interviewed around the country and abroad for her blog.

We sat recently in her snug, four-seat oyster bar for a deep dive into her relationship with oysters and oyster culture in Maine. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I was kind of struggling at the time. I had a deep connection to nature when I was a kid, and had fond memories both in Maryland and Florida of adventure. Much of that was inspired by my grandparents. But as I got into my twenties, as a lot of people do, you fall into that sort of corporate structure. And I realized that I had a job in sales, but no hobbies.

So when I started to think about what I loved when I was a kid, it was marshy wetlands, snails, shells, trees, all of theses sort of crunchy things along the coast. And I loved oysters. Warwick (her husband Warwick Ombler) and I had been to every single raw bar in Boston. We had fallen in love with keeping track of the oysters we tried. And I thought, “This is something I really love, it reminds me of my grandparents, and I want to be creative with that.”

Essentially, I’m still selling. I’m just doing it for an industry I really love. I like to think the work I do now is being a really great advocate for small businesses, and also being an ambassador for their stories, when they have to be out on the water, doing their work. In the past, I was advocating for a $20 billion business, and the contracts I was working on were for 100-plus million dollars a year. Miss the salary (laughs), which was why it was so hard to leave. The stakes were really high.

Each one of those women proved that if you really loved something and had a dream, you could change your own path. I needed that real-world example of women who had the courage to pursue their own businesses.

There are a lot of honest people in this industry who have a real sense of noble purpose as part of their core. I didn’t have many examples of that in the work I was doing at the time, in corporate sales. I think when I found this on the coast, I gravitated toward them. I was in awe of them, and I admired their courage to not ask for permission in any sense for what they wanted to do.

Oyster knives hang below one of the many pictures that document the oyster industry at The Parlor oyster bar in Bath. (Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer)

Absolutely. Maine has the most equitable (aquaculture) when it comes to oysters in the country. I think we have more women than anywhere else. In perhaps the world, though I don’t know that for sure — it just feels that way.

Of course there’s discrimination, even the women in the book faced that in many parts of other fisheries in Maine. But oyster aquaculture allows you to be very independent, very in control of your own business destiny. I think the entrepreneurship here is a huge part of why there’s equity in Maine.

There is a new education platform for this, called the Oyster Master Guild. It’s three years old now, and it was started by a woman named Julie Qiu, who has been an educator and consultant in shellfish for upwards of 20 years, and Patrick McMurray in Toronto, who was one of the Guinness world record holders for fastest shucker.

Both of them realized there was an opportunity. The raw bar is a very special, unique space. It’s often front-of-the-house, so it sits between the kitchen and the servers, where they’re still having conversations with guests. There was an understanding that we needed to create an education program and kind of level up the skill sets required to run a raw bar.

Built into the education platform was this track to become an oyster sommelier, where you’re not only learning hospitality and the level of service required for the raw bar, but you’re taking it to the next level of taste work, and educating about process and the people behind it, much like a wine sommelier would do. So now there’s an oyster tasting wheel and tasting journals.

Pictures that document the oyster industry hang on the wall at The Parlor oyster bar in Bath. Many of the pictures were taken by Shaffer. (Daryn Slover/Staff Photographer)

Restaurants with a really high quality raw bar program are searching for people who have been certified. We see that in a lot of spots in New York City like Crave Fishbar, and Taylor Shellfish on the West Coast. In Maine, Andy Rogers up at Jolie Rogers in Wiscasset is a certified Level 2 sommelier.

I’m looking for a bunch of things. Salinity, of course; sweetness; texture like firm or buttery or chewy; mouthfeel and how minerality works, like tannins on the palate. There’s a lot of differences out there, even in Maine. From bay to bay and river to river, there’s different algae, phytoplankton, minerality, temperatures and salinity in the water.

You can detect flavor qualities like nuttiness. There are botanical notes like smells of rose, and fruity or vegetal notes like watermelon and cucumber. They can sometimes taste very metallic, and that can kind of throw some people off. There are off notes as well, like when something is too bitter in the finish.

I chose Shuck Station because Brendan (owner Brendan Parsons) and I have very similar beliefs. I was taken by how he wanted to celebrate Damariscotta oysters in Damariscotta. He was like, “Why can’t people come to the Napa Valley of oysters and learn about the oysters here?” He has a great story-telling format, with a tribute wall of farmers and their faces, and his menu is a map, which gives geographical context and helps build a sense of place.

For other bars, OystHERS (in Bath), I love. We’re neighbors. They are just the essence of hometown pride, with a really incredible raw bar program, and a spotlight on woman-owned farms.

The Shop (by Island Creek Oysters) in Portland is providing the most affordable price point for oysters. They’ve got great oysters and a really wide selection, and that’s all thanks to Island Creek’s distribution.

SoPo Seafood — they’re just seafood savants. Masters of the raw bar, and crudos on top. They know the highest quality of oysters we have in Maine, and they’re serving them.

There’s Scales if you want to ogle some of the fastest shuckers we have in Maine. And Andy at Jolie Rogers, of course. A lot of people in the oyster industry see him as a celebrity because he’s so incredibly fast. Highroller Lobster Co. — they’re known for Lobby Pops, but the raw bar is low-key outstanding.