Saving Seafood

Feeding the Limitless Maine Lobster Roll Boom, Seafloor to Summer Table

July 31, 2025 — “We’ll start with six lobster rolls,” the man in sunglasses and madras shorts said when he reached the front of the line at McLoons Lobster Shack on the tip of Sprucehead Island in Maine.

That was only his opening bid. By the time everyone in his family had weighed in, his lobster roll count was up to nine.

There are other things on the menu at McLoons — chowders and burgers and grilled littleneck clams — but the lobster roll outsells them all by far.

On the Sunday in July I spent at McLoons, in South Thomaston, Me., the place never got truly mobbed. The sky was the color of a fishing sinker and everyone knew an afternoon thunderstorm was on the way. But still they came, the locals and the visitors, almost all of them with the same thing in mind. As Mariah Watkinson, who was working the order window, put it, “There’s usually a lobster roll in every order.”

In 2012, McLoons Lobster Shack’s first season, its manager, Bree Birns, worked almost completely alone and sold about 40 lobster rolls a day. Now, on a busy summer day, the shack will make 500 of them, and she needs 10 full-time workers and 16 part-timers to keep up.

In the intervening 13 years, the demand for lobster rolls has been pushed higher and higher by forces that are often external to Maine. Entrepreneurs in New York City and Los Angeles, taking advantage of deflated lobster prices and the ascent of trucks, stalls and windows devoted to affordable, portable treats, helped build a vast, urban audience for the sandwich. One of these businesses, Luke’s Lobster, now sells about a million lobster rolls a year at its shacks in 12 states, Singapore and Japan.

Read the full article at The New York Times

The story of how the lobster roll became New England’s most iconic food

July 26, 2024 — Few foods evoke summer in New England like the lobster roll. The sandwiches are as iconic as lighthouses and the dropped r’s of the northeastern U.S. region’s unique Yankee dialects. Once a lowly work lunch for fishermen, the lobster roll is in such demand today that Hannaford supermarkets has announced a $10 version of the coastal classic, available across stores until Labor Day.

“As New England tourism has grown, the rise of the lobster roll has gone along with it,” says Evan Hennessey, chef-owner of Stages at One Washington and the Living Room in Dover, New Hampshire. “It’s this incredible, flavorful, quintessential right-from-the-ocean New England food that—and here’s the key part—you can walk around and eat.”

History of the lobster roll

Lobster didn’t always have such cachet. The crustaceans were once so abundant that they could easily be caught in shallow waters. “For a long time, [lobsters] were just local food—stuff you ate if you lived on the coast,” says Boston University food historian Megan Elias.

Branden Lewis, chef and sustainability professor at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, says that English and Portuguese sailors, shipwrights, and fishermen created the earliest iteration of the lobster roll by tucking the discarded trimmings of tail and claw meat between pieces of bread.

Lobster recipes didn’t gain cultural capital until the country’s nascent elite began vacationing along the East Coast, especially in states like Rhode Island, where they built summer “cottages.” The rolls were a mainstay until the early 1960s, when the country found itself besotted by the “proper” cooking techniques of Julia Child.

New England’s iconic sandwich came back into fashion in the 1990s, with the renewed interest in American regional foods. “By then, lobster is even more expensive,” Elias says. “There are even fewer of them. So it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s regional and it’s also hard to get, so it must be cool.’”

Read the full article at National Geographic

A Restaurant’s Sales Pitch: Know Your Lobster

August 25, 2016 — It was a steamy summer day in New York in 2009 when Luke Holden, an investment banker, had a craving for a lobster roll. Not just any lobster roll, though. He longed for the “fresh off the docks” taste he enjoyed growing up in Cape Elizabeth, Me.

After an exhaustive search on New York’s streets, he came up dissatisfied and disappointed.

“Every lobster was served over a white tablecloth, extremely expensive, drowning in mayo and diluted with celery,” he said. “I wondered why all the great chefs in this city had screwed this up so badly.”

So that year, Mr. Holden decided to open an authentic Maine lobster shack in Manhattan. To replicate that fresh taste that he remembered, he would need to oversee, track and, where possible, own every step in the process.

Today, he owns 19 Luke’s Lobster restaurants, two food trucks and a lobster tail cart in the United States, and five shacks in Japan.

He holds an ownership stake in a co-op of Maine fishermen, which allows him to track where and how the lobsters are caught, and control the quality, freshness and pricing. He also owns the processing plant, Cape Seafood, that packages and prepares the lobsters for his restaurants.

“We’re able to trace every pound of seafood we serve back to the harbor where it was sustainably caught and to support fishermen we know and trust,” Mr. Holden said. “There’s no middleman in that whole chain.”

This might seem obsessive. But in business, it’s called a vertical integration strategy.

Read the full story at The New York Times

Two Maritime Towns Are Arguing Over Who Made The Biggest Lobster Roll

September 21, 2015 — A bitter feud is brewing on Canada’s East Coast as two towns go head to head in a heated battle for lobster roll supremacy.

On Sunday, attendees of the P.E.I. International Shellfish Festival in Charlottetown made what they claim in the world’s longest lobster roll.

Measuring 79 feet and one inch long and filled with 75 pounds of the tasty crustacean, this was a serious lobster roll.

Read the full story from Buzzfeed