Affiliation: PRESTIGE OYSTERS INC. Location : SAN LEON, TEXAS
Raz Halili’s earliest memories are of riding along on an oyster boat, the smell of salt water and diesel fuel mingling at Redfish Island off the San Leon Peninsula in Texas. By his teens, he was out oystering himself, helping his father, a Kosovar immigrant of Albanian descent, and his mother, a native Texan, build their burgeoning company, Prestige Oysters Inc.
Some three decades later, Halili and his parents now run a Prestige that looks very different: The outfit’s thirty-five boats harvest some million oysters annually, year-round, from fifty thousand acres of waters along the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and into Florida. The bounty pops up in restaurants nationwide, and even in Whole Foods and Publix. But for the Halilis,…