Three of the suppliers on this page are not in Houston, and they are listed with their real cities showing: San Leon, Anahuac and Texas City, roughly 35, 50 and 40 miles out. They are here because the federal shellfish list treats the whole corridor as one supply base, because the two oyster shippers that actually feed Houston restaurants are both coastal, and because the operator comments below say so independently. Six of the 24 are Houstonians telling other Houstonians to drive to Kemah, Seabrook, Galveston or Chocolate Bayou.
What this page will not do is print Houston as the city for a company in San Leon. We did not capture the federal metro-area definition, so nothing here asserts these towns are the Houston metro; the claim is driving distance, which is what we can show. Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Corpus Christi are all out, and a San Antonio wholesaler that surfaces in a state directory stays off, exactly as it did on our Dallas page.
The coastal supply is also the least reliable part of this market, and the reason is documented. On 17 April 2026 Texas Parks and Wildlife closed area TX-1 in Galveston Bay to commercial and recreational oyster harvest from 21 April, on samples showing a low abundance of legal-sized oysters. That was the last open public harvest area in the bay, closing just over a week before the season ended on 30 April, with the other two areas already shut earlier in the year. In this case the cause was overharvesting rather than weather, and the department's own ecosystem leader noted it had been unusual in the past decade for Galveston Bay to stay open all season.
One of the suppliers on this page argued the consequence publicly: nobody in the business can keep a business running off public reef. He was making the case for private bottom leases and certificates of location, and said fifty applications had already been accepted along the Texas coast when the November 2025 window closed. Areas do reopen and the state publishes a live status map, so this page does not say the bay is shut. It says the public reef is not a supply you can plan a menu around.
