Pamela Levi loves oysters, but she never thought one of her favorite foods would pay out.
Levi bit into an oyster while eating an Oysters Rockefeller pizza Friday night at Goatfeathers in Columbia, South Carolina.
She thought it had shattered a tooth.
“I thought, ‘I’m suing!'” laughed Levi, “but I really thought I’d broken a tooth!”
“Very ladylike, “I’m trying to take this out of my mouth,” said Levi. “It was round, so it kinda felt like a BB, as I was taking it out of my mouth, Jeff was sitting across from me.”
“All of a sudden she’s looking really weird and I look over and she pulls this pearl out of her mouth,” said Goatfeathers owner Jeff Helsley.
Helsley worked as an oyster shucker growing up, but he never saw a pearl quite like Levi’s.
“Somebody at the bar had gotten a really tiny one and he was bragging about that, and we said uh uh, we showed him this one and it blew him away!” said Helsley.
“When I was young I heard on the news about someone finding a pearl in an oyster and I thought that would be the ultimate,” said Levi. “So when it happened to me it was incredible.”
And it’s incredibly rare–as in one in the tens of thousands.
That makes Levi one lucky lady.
“I don’t play the lottery but I did buy a scratch off ticket the other day and won 75 dollars! Holla!” she laughed.
That’s probably more than she’ll get for the pearl.
Restaurant oysters aren’t usually the ones that produce high-dollar gems.
But it’s at least worth a good story.
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