by Nick Macksood
Consider the lobster, David Foster Wallace once asked of us. Homarus americanus. The King of Crustaceans. Once considered low-class food, the lobster, these days, is not only considered haute cuisine but is also the titular choice of the summer’s best art house film starring Colin Farrell. Who’d have guessed?
At the Seafood Shanty, however, the east coast’s ubiquitous benthic carnivore is dished up and served to you at the affordable price of $19.99. During lunchtime, these one and a half pounders come dressed with clarified butter, lemon and French fries; while dinner service transforms the side of fries back into their Platonic form, the baked potato.
Any well-cooked lobster is a sight to behold–which is to say absolutely nothing (yet) about how it tastes. From this point onward, allow this fledgling writer to act as if I’ve just discovered lobster–at the Seafood Shanty, no less–and am now passing along the delectable results of my first taste to you, reader.
When cooked, this marine crustacean turns a bright, stop sign red, flecked with contrasting freckles from its hothouse spa treatment. Flecked with parsley flakes and dashed with lemon wedges, this weird looking bottom-feeder starts to resemble a modern work of art. No wonder Dali claimed to eat lobster exclusively for dinner. And the taste? Oh, the taste. Lobster is unmistakably sweet and has a meaty texture to it. Its tail and its big, honking claws hold all that pink treasure beneath its shell. To get there, we must be intrepid, atavistic eaters. Armed with some foreign nutcracker and a shrunken fork that nobody has stored away in their kitchen cabinets and drawers, the lobster’s shell can be circumvented rather easily, albeit messily. Thank the Lord, or perhaps just the Shanty, for supplying a bib while diving headfirst into one. You won’t look that silly, trust me, everyone’s doing it.
