About a year ago, Michael Stadtländer loped into Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar in a red shirt and wide-brimmed farmer’s hat. He came to talk about himself—we’d been trying to schedule an interview for months—but instead, he delivered a paean to mussels. A new variety had been cultivated in the turbulent waters off Quadra Island, second largest of B.C.’s Gulf Islands.

“Oh, they are so lush and sweet!” he exclaimed. “You must try them.” These were strong words—Stadtländer doesn’t make endorsements easi­ly. Mussels are the poor man’s shellfish (less than $4 a pound); their firm, meaty texture makes them an excellent vehicle for buttery, boozy, garlicky sauces. Some 80 per cent of the mussels we eat in North America come from P.E.I.; nearly 40 million pounds are cultivated annually off the island’s shores. But not all P.E.I.s are equal: while some are plump and juicy, others can be sadly wizened, making them easy to overcook. Eating a bowl’s worth sometimes seems more like an archaeological dig than a relaxing meal. The new B.C. honey, however, is high in fat (the good kind), twice as meaty as the Maritimers and revered by western chefs—from Vancouver’s C Restaurant to the Bellagio in Las Vegas to Napa Valley’s Bouchon.

In 1999, shellfish farmers and high school buddies Dale William­son and Martin Ellis were tending their oyster beds when they first came up with the idea of trying to breed the native Pacific blue. “They grow on everything—we’d pull up a line of oysters and there’d be these mussels all over them,” says Williamson. They were honey sweet, and about one in a thousand yielded golden flesh. So they started a collection, looking for the prettiest, plumpest, most brilliant-coloured specimens. Then they did what any savvy farmer would do: they attempted to replicate those extraordinary characteristics through breeding. “Basically, we stole it from Mother Nature,” says Williamson.

It was an anxious 18 months as they waited for their first crop. The mussel spat spent four months in a hatchery, gorging on plankton. When they were as large as a speck of pepper, Williamson and Ellis took them to sea, suspending them from an artificial reef “nursery.” A year later, they hand-sorted and graded the adolescents for size.

The crop was even better than they had hoped. “The shells were just plugged full of meat,” says Williamson. Stadtländer, a one-time resident of Quadra, was on the island visiting friends when the farmers sent word of these incredible native mussels.