Everyone’s abuzz with Lobster Rolls coming to DC, and I’m starting to wonder if I’ve become a curmudgeon. Don’t get me wrong I fucking love seafood salad on a buttered bun, maybe better than the beautiful crab cakes I grew up on, but a recent stop over in New Hampshire makes me think the Lobster Roll just don’t belong here.
On the way to a wedding last Fall I passed a dingy seafood distribution house and promised myself a visit on the way back. Keeping that pledge I encountered a difficult choice. A regular lobster roll was priced at $6.95 and “double stuffed” came in at around 9 dollars. I asked the brace-face teenager working the counter what most people ordered, and followed suit with a regular.
10 minutes later I’m staring at a gargantuan pink claw protruding from a comparatively diminutive bun. The thing was massive. And it was good. Turns out the double stuffed I didn’t order is really a double lobster roll — the seafood equivalent of Ye Old 96′er — and way more than I needed. The small and meager roll I remembered loving earlier in DC quickly became a source of disappointment. It had cost me 23 bucks.
A quick flickr search tells me I don’t have to worry about Red Hook Lobster Pound dicking me over with portion size but their website says I’ll have to part with 15 bones to enjoy the delicacy. It’s still potentially the best deal in town, but it’s got me thinking… In a food culture where all the twitterati and foodnicks are urging us to embrace local foods, why are we so excited to pay a premium for something that a few hundred miles away is commonplace?
Where the hell are the decent local crab cakes? With the largest estuary in the US a few miles away and crab populations on the rebound you think I wouldn’t have to spend an hour on the red line to find a worthy specimen. I guess it’s the proverbial grass is allays greener that allows cuisine from the Eastern Shore draws moths to the light in Manhattan while New Yorkers can attract press by sending DC a Lobster Roll.
I’d love the localvore movement to spur a resurgence in what was once a commonplace of my youth – quality local crab cakes made with tons of Chesapeake crab meat — But while bartenders are spending 8 dollars to drink imports that go down like Budwieser I won’t hold my breath. And in the mean time I’ll salivate over Red Hooks Roll.
Photo from Flickr user kthread
