New York City is coming up pearls.
For the second time this month, a restaurant patron has chomped down on an oyster only to find a valuable pearl. Kristin Pulaski, 29, found her very own bivalve beauty last Saturday at Williamsburg bar Maison Premiere.
“My first thought was, ‘Is this like a screw or something in here?’ ” she said of the hard, pea-sized object. “And I took it out and saw that it couldn’t have been anything else [but a pearl]. It was pearly white and round.”
Pulaski was shocked when she read in The Post that Rick Antosh, 66, had also found a pearl in his oyster, at Grand Central Oyster Bar on Dec. 5, with one appraiser originally valuing it at up to $4,000.
Experts say the chances of finding a pearl in an oyster is about 1 in 10,000.
On Wednesday, Pulaski, who lives in Williamsburg and owns the neighborhood’s Paintbucket Nail Salon, got her prize appraised at DSL Pearl on West 47th Street. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the cash cow she had hoped for.
“Natural pearls can be very valuable, but when they come in shapes that are imperfect like this and don’t have that sheen, it would only be worth about $200,” said Eddy Livi, the store’s owner.
Livi said that, unlike Antosh’s pearl, which was “rounder and more lustrous,” Pulaski’s pearl was on the lumpy side and less shiny.
Although he had originally appraised Antosh’s pearl at $4,000 based on a photograph, Livi lowered his valuation to $400 after seeing it in person — saying the gem was smaller than he had
realized.
Pulaski said she’ll likely hold onto the pearl, and perhaps get a jeweler to make it into a statement piece since it has such a good story behind it.
In the nearly eight years Maison Premiere has been open, “We’ve served over 4 million oysters, [and] this is the first time a pearl has ever been found,” said co-founder Joshua Boissy.
Pulaski now has a new appreciation for the briny delicacies that most people gulp down without a second thought.
“I’ll usually bite down on oysters a few times because I like the taste, but I know some people just swallow it whole,” she said. “So maybe people swallow pearls more than they think.”