The Iron Chef and I pledged to decompress after Knudelfest so here we are on the North Carolina coast. We’ve been hitting the trails hard. At this point we are damn near thru-hikers on the Wilmington Ale Trail and we’ve made a good dent in the North Carolina Oyster Trail.

We knew from our time in Asheville that North Carolinians make some tasty brews, so Wilmington as beer mecca wasn’t a complete surprise. In a few days of decompression, we were able to hoist pints at Front Street, Good Hops, Waterline, Wrightsville Beach, and Ponysaurus. The breweries couldn’t have been more different. Front Street’s copper brewing equipment and gorgeously carved wooden bar in historic downtown contrasted with Waterline’s renovated warehouse under the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge. Ponysaurus is a Raleigh-based brewery but features their taproom with a massive and festive beer garden in Wilmington (and according to Chef, a kick ass Biere de Garde). Good Hops stole my heart with their Carolina Beach brewery complete with a disc golf course and a female brewer who likes porters as much as I do. Score!

This part of North Carolina is a hugely important oyster growing region. In a stroke of luck, our trip coincided with a showing of documentaries about local oyster farmers and wild harvesters at the stunning and historic Thalian Hall. As a landlocked Podunkian, my oyster knowledge was a bit lacking. But the films did a beautiful job introducing me to passionate oyster farmers and their view of regenerative agriculture. I had no idea that in North Carolina, it is illegal to dispose of oyster shells in landfills since they are needed for reef building. Did you?

We slurped oysters at every opportunity. The Thalian Hall event featured brilliant chefs and oyster farmers shucking for our tasting pleasure, complete with condiments like sea bean salsa verde. The Wrightsville Beach Brewery (ah, you thought I’d forgotten about them) served up our only oysters gathered wild from a nearby marsh, which is why that brewery gets extra stars even without having a disc golf course.

The NC Oyster Trail pointed us firmly in one direction and that was north along the coast to N. Sea Oyster Company. The young family that owns N. Sea “starred” in the Shellbound film and they allow weekday drop-ins like us to buy their Dukes of Topsail oysters and shuck them ourselves on-site, while plying us with cilantro mignette and cold beverages. [Editor’s note: By “shuck them ourselves”, I mean to say of the 3 dozen oysters we purchased, I shucked approximately 3 total].

Believe it or not, advancing along the Ale Trail and the Oyster Trail was not enough excitement for us. Our bellies full and our livers slightly puffy, we moved on to Carolina Beach State Park, in search of the rare, endangered Venus flytrap. I felt uniquely qualified to search for this plant found only in the coastal Carolinas because a) I forage for mushrooms, and b) I have seen Little Shop of Horrors several times. And guess what? That was enough! We found a total of three itsy bitsy, perfectly formed carniverous plants. OK. I’ll confess that Chef spotted the first one. And that the trail we were on was literally called the Flytrap Trail. But still, I have rarely been so excited to find a plant that I can’t eat.

Next up in my new short series on North Carolina — The Coast is Very Beachy.