Lobster Roll

by Celia Sin-Tien Cheng
October 21, 2006

URBAN LOBSTER [CLOSED]
240 E Houston St
(Aves A & B)
New York, NY 10002
212-677-2626

This seems to be the month of comparisons. First Torys and Yakitori Totto, and now I’m pitting Tides’s lobster roll against Urban Lobster’s. Actually, in this case, it’s not much of a competition. Tides wins hands down.

Urban Lobster opened this month and it’s trying to turn New England seafood favorites, like lobster rolls, into a fast food business. But at $19 a pop, these are not fast food prices. I would willingly pay a couple bucks more to eat the superior lobster roll at Pearl, Tides, The Mermaid Inn or Mary’s, which have pleasant atmospheres to boost. You can probably already see where this is going.

There are two small tables and a side counter for diners to eat in, but Urban Lobster’s slogan is “prepared seafood to go” and that’s the business they want to run. Based on the seafood boom that New York City has seen, creating a take-out seafood restaurant should make for higher profit margins, as you don’t have to deal with table service.

The “restaurant” is set up more like a deli. Upon entering, the cashier and drinks are to the right and straight ahead is where you order. You walk up to a counter where the salads and sides sit behind the glass partition. The kitchen is behind the counter. The problem with food sitting out in a counter like this is that it can’t retain freshness for very long. I love an avocado, tomatoes and red onion salad, but the avocados were brown and just didn’t look appetizing. The salads seemed to be in good shape, but the tuna salad looked like food poisoning waiting to happen. At 5pm, dinner dishes were being prepared and brought out, so the sides like corn on the cob and red bliss mashed potatoes with fresh butter looked enticing.

I decided to test out the lobster roll. If the selling point of the restaurant wasn’t any good, I don’t know what else could be. I started to have my doubts as soon as I saw the large chunks of celery in the lobster salad — one of my pet peeves is when people can’t bother to cut things delicately. Let’s just say that you could tell it was the workmanship of a take-out joint rather than a restaurant.

The description for the roll on the menu reads: “a mound of fresh lobster salad stuffed into a buttered toasted hot dog bun, served with cole slaw.” That hot dog bun was definitely not toasted, in fact it was as cold as could be. It would have been better toasted, but the cold bun wasn’t really a point of contention for me.

Though cole slaw is a fairly traditional accompaniment to seafood in New England, I found it to be a bad choice as the only side dish offered with the lobster roll. Not only was the cole slaw bad, but its distinctive taste also clashed with the lobster. After I had finished this meal, the taste of the sea lingered in my mouth like a bad aftertaste. Even when I tried to get rid of it with a nice dry Riesling, it didn’t go away.

Urban Lobster has received a lot of press in the past two weeks. For the amount of money they spent on PR, they might have put some dollars into their website too. They have been fixing it up but it still looks like a hack job. It’s pretty amusing. But, as you know, food for me is no laughing matter.

Also in American, LES, Lobster, Seafood