Scott Overland had a pretty good vacation in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware with his wife and two children. Overland took some time off from his job in corporate communications in Philadelphia. He was looking for some R&R, but what he found was some $&$.
On August 9, while eating at a local seafood spot called Salt Air, he found a surprise in his clam appetizer…a purple pearl.
“I was the one mostly eating the clams and towards the end of the dish, I just chomp down on something that felt kind of hard,” Scott Overland told TODAY Food. “I thought it was a shell or something like that, but then looked and it was this little purple thing.”
Overland’s first thought was that it was something the chef had just accidentally dropped in his dish. After all, it was purple. Who knew about purple pearls?
But then he and his wife both noticed the indention in the clam shell where the pearl had obviously grown.
“That’s when we sort of realized this was not something from the kitchen and probably something from the clam,” Overland said.
The couple immediately got their phones out and became Google experts on purple pearls.
“We found that this actually was something kind of rare and special, and saw a wide range of values, from $600 to even $16,000.”
The restaurant confirmed the clam was a northern quahog. It was grown by Cherrystone Aqua Farms in the Chesapeake Bay.
Only one in 5,000 of these clams produces a pearl, with most found damaged or in poor quality because of all the processing.
The dish the pearl came from only cost Overland $14, but the staff at the restaurant were great sports even when they found out their clam was worth thousands.
“As we were paying, I showed the waitress and she was really excited,” Overland said, adding that she took a few selfies with it herself and proudly announced the find to her co-workers. “As we were leaving, we heard her telling all the other servers, ‘My customer just found a pearl in his clam!’ She seemed really excited about it.”
Overland said, “If it’s appraised at a certain value, it may be hard to justify keeping it, but I have a six-year-old daughter who I’m sure would love to have it,” Overland said.
“We might try to turn it into something so we can have a special family heirloom. That, or I have to keep eating clams and find a second one if I want to turn it into earrings,” he added.
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