Why We Built a Farm-to-Table Restaurant on a Working Oyster Farm

This story doesn't begin with a restaurant. It begins with an oyster.

It started at a Whole Foods. Matt Gregg was standing behind a table, shucking his own oysters and offering them to anyone who walked by. No fanfare. Just a farmer and his product and the people passing through.

I tried one and understood immediately. The oysters were extraordinary — briny and meaty and specific to the bay in a way that told you they had come from somewhere real. And the man farming them cared about it the way I had always believed food sourcing should be cared about. With integrity. With reverence for the water. With a genuine belief that what he was building mattered beyond the harvest.

I started sourcing from him immediately. That relationship only grew from there.

Seven Years in the Making

In 2019, Pablo Toxqui and I founded Haute Feast. We had met working together at a restaurant in Asbury Park — he was the executive chef, I was the general manager — and what we discovered in each other was a shared obsession. Local ingredients. The farmers and fishermen behind them. The belief that food tastes different when you know the face of the person who grew it.

Haute Feast was built on that belief from day one. Over seven years we cooked at farms and on docks and in fields across New Jersey. We built relationships with producers whose practices we trusted and whose values we shared. We let the harvest lead the menu. We showed up for the farmers the way we asked them to show up for us.

And through all of it — every season, every event, every table we set in a new and beautiful place — Matt Gregg and Barnegat Oyster Collective were part of the story. The oysters on our raw bar were always his. The relationship that had started in 2016 had never really paused.

The Night Everything Changed

In September of 2024, Haute Feast produced a collaboration dinner at Barnegat Oyster Collective. An evening on the water — the fire, the food, Matt's oysters, the bay at golden hour. The kind of night that reminds you exactly why you do what you do.

It was, in a word, dreamy.

Somewhere in the warmth of that evening, over oysters and whatever Pablo had put on the fire, the conversation turned to what it might look like to keep doing this together. Not just as collaborators for a single evening — but as partners in something more permanent. Something rooted in this specific place, this specific bay, this specific relationship that had been quietly building for nearly a decade.

We didn't make any decisions that night. But something had shifted.

The Phone Call

In late March of 2025, Matt called.

He and his co-founder Scott Lennox wanted to know if Pablo and I would partner with them on a restaurant at Barnegat Oyster Collective. A real restaurant — open every weekend through the summer, on the grounds of the farm, with the bay as the backdrop and Sugar Shack oysters coming off the water minutes before they hit the raw bar.

And they wanted to open in eight weeks.

Eight weeks.

It was, by any reasonable measure, an insane proposition. Unthinkable, even. The logistics alone were staggering. But Pablo and I looked at each other and already knew the answer. This was not a business decision. This was the thing we had been building toward for seven years without knowing exactly what shape it would take.

We locked in. We got to work. And on Memorial Day weekend of 2025, Haute Feast at Barnegat Oyster Collective opened its doors for the first time.

Why Here

People ask us sometimes why we chose to build a restaurant on a working oyster farm. The honest answer is that we didn't choose it the way you choose a location. It chose us — or more accurately, it was the inevitable result of a relationship that had been growing since 2016.

When you dine at Haute Feast at Barnegat Oyster Collective, the distance between the farm and your plate is not a marketing concept. It is a physical reality. The oysters on your tray were in the bay this morning. The farm nursery is visible from your table. The man who grew what you're eating might be standing thirty feet away.

That is what farm-to-table means to us. Not a phrase printed on a menu. A relationship, maintained over years, that eventually became a restaurant.

This is our second summer on the bay. We are more rooted here than ever.

And we are just getting started.

Haute Feast at Barnegat Oyster Collective is open Friday through Monday, Memorial Day Weekend through end of September, at Barnegat Oyster Collective on Barnegat Bay, NJ. Reserve your table at hautefeast.com/restaurant. Learn more about Barnegat Oyster Collective and Sugar Shack oysters at barnegatoyster.com.