Lauren and Sadia Crosby’s story sounds like the plot of a Victorian novel. The tale opens with the two sisters growing up in Georgetown, raised by a commercial lobsterman who insisted that he didn’t want any of his children to follow in his footsteps. Lauren moved west to teach English, while Sadia stuck around Maine and became an arborist.
Neither took up lobstering, but it was impossible for them to escape the allure of the ocean. “So I started waiting tables at a seafood restaurant in Alaska, and Sadia got around my dad’s wishes by starting her own oyster farm (also named OystHers). At first it was just as a way to get back on the working waterfront in a different capacity, and only as a side-hustle,” co-owner Lauren Crosby said.
“But by 2021, she had her first harvest and was surprised at how much immediate popularity she gained, only selling to restaurants. Then our dad passed away, and it was a huge wake-up call for us. So we decided to come back to Bath, the place where our mother and grandmother went to school, and open our own restaurant.
” Seriously, George Eliot herself couldn’t have come up with a better storyline, especially the part where the pair acquired a former tattoo studio on the banks of the Kennebec River – a building with a collapsing roof, holes in the walls and no plumbing – and slowly transformed it into a colorful, casual, canine-friendly home for OystHers Raw Bar & Bubbly. True to the sisters’ vision of creating a comfortable a.
