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Top FeedersThe one-time “insect of the seas,” lobster is now at the summit of the luxury food chain.
Not long ago, I was at a place where the claws were most certainly out and where the sheer number of bottom-feeders was striking. No, I was not in Paris for Fashion Week. And, no, I wasn’t pacing the Golden Globe’s red carpet. I was in Bar Harbor, Maine, a town whose historical trajectory is the opposite of its resident delicacy, lobster. The town endured a famous blaze in 1947 that destroyed Millionaires’ Row (once the home of Astors, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, not to mention Katharine Hepburn), but it remains a postcard-worthy summer destination with a faintly gilded aura. Although lobsters were once dismissed as insects of the sea (considered such peasant fare, they used to be fed only to prisoners), they have since become ever-increasing emblems of extravagance. Which is how I found myself studying a tycoon seducing one. “Watch this,” Michael Walsh said with the brio of a Boston-brogued Tony Soprano, when a very much alive crustacean was deposited at our table at Stewman’s Lobster Pound. “I’m gonna hypnotize it.” The creature was flailing its limbs like Luciano Pavarotti. While holding it upside down, Walsh started rubbing the lobster’s head. Slowly. Confidently. I was almost inspired to reach for some nice eucalyptus massage oil. Before long, the creature was in a trance, a victim of a little lobster shiatsu. Magic Fingers grinned and added wickedly, “Now if only I could do that with the girls.” All of us at the seaside patio gave the lobster a metaphoric salute. And then we ate one of its cousins. |
