Perry and Laura Solomon share their bespoke Salt Bombs fresh from Tybee Island waters in Georgia
Perry Solomon grew up fishing, crabbing, and harvesting oysters with his family in Tybee Island waters. He and his girlfriend, now wife, Laura, bonded eating oysters roasted over a flickering fire on Tybee beaches. Their affection for Georgia’s coastal ecosystem and the seafood it produces sparked the idea for their own homegrown oyster farm while Perry was a Navy pilot.
“We weren’t in Georgia at the time but saw oyster farming popping up around the South and thought, we want to do that at home,” Laura says. The concept came easy; the execution proved harder as state agencies worked to figure out how to manage the aquaculture industry approved by the Georgia legislature in 2019. But the Solomons are as tenacious as they are curious and were undeterred by slowdowns. In 2023, their Tybee Oyster Company, the state’s first off-bottom oyster farm, offered its inaugural batch of Salt Bombs to the public—who instantly said, “More please.”
“It’s been so great to see how much people love them,” Laura says. “We have a waiting list at restaurants in Savannah and surrounding areas, so many people want them.” The farm’s high-salinity location lends credence to the name. (The moniker also nods to a 1958 collision between two Air Force jets that left a bomb lost in nearby Wassaw Sound.)
As they scale up to meet exploding demand and plan a retail store, the Solomons face another hurdle: hurricanes. Last year a storm took half their baby oysters and some gear. “The storms were a punch, but we can’t quit,” Laura says. “As the first Georgia farm, there’s a lot of attention on us, and we feel the need to help the industry here. And Perry and I are super stubborn, so we’ve got that going for us.”
“The farm is at the mouth of the Bull River and in sight of the open Atlantic Ocean, so our Salt Bombs are salty. And the spartina grass on the shoreline seasonally offers notes of lemongrass. One restaurant described it as a briny punch with a sweet finish, and that’s very accurate.”
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Jennifer Stewart Kornegay
Freelance writer and editor Jennifer Stewart Kornegay lives in Montgomery, Alabama, and writes about food, food culture and variety of other lifestyle topics for national and regional publications including Garden & Gun, Southern Living, The Local Palate, Conde Nast Traveler, Modern Farmer, The Bitter Southerner and AllRecipes.com.
