Maine native Luke Holden has spent his whole life around lobsters. The son of Jeffrey Holden, a former lobsterman and owner of a large Maine-based lobster and shellfish processing operation, Luke was born and raised in Cape Elizabeth, a charming coastal town south of Portland. He got his start working with his dad as a kid. “When I was eight or ten years old, I started working in the processing plants, and then fourteen, fifteen, I started being a sternman, learning the tricks.”
Lobstermen are a salty lot. It’s a rough, physical business and not one you can easily jump into. As a sternman—the lobstering equivalent of a deck-hand—Luke baited and emptied traps and learned the ropes of the business—the spoken and unspoken rules of the water. A few years later, he built his own skiff and started lobstering himself, with his youngest brother as his sternman. But it wasn’t until he found himself working in New York City post-college and craving a lobster roll that the idea of building his own lobster business took root.
“I was at my desk, doing investment banking in Midtown, and I was looking for a lobster roll. Jumped online and found there was nothing out there that was served at an affordable price in a Down East-style environment. The average price was $30, and it was all white-tablecloth.” Luke embarked on a lobster mission, tasting rolls across the city and trying to figure out why the price was so high and why you simply couldn’t find a roll likes the ones back home.
It wasn’t long before he noticed a trend. In order to keep food costs down, restaurants were diluting the lobster meat with fillers like celery and bell pepper, while dressing up the roll with frills like tarragon, avocado, and kaffir lime leaf mayonnaise—fancy menu marketing to justify the extra-fancy price tag. “There were just all of these really great restaurants who were screwing it up … it was a bunch of really high-end chefs who were adding their own interpretation of what a lobster roll was, but not necessarily what a traditional Maine lobster roll was.” By specializing in a few menu items and sourcing direct from his father, Luke was able to break traditional food cost models by moving volume.
“When anybody looks at our margins, nobody really ever thinks it makes any sense because traditional food costs are much lower than the average ticket price. But for us, this is the tolerable price point. This is where it needs to be from our prospective for quality, and we’ve been able to match the level of demand with a lower margin to make it work.”
Up north, the rolls are simple: lobster, mayo, split-top bun. Uncomplicated. Unfooled around with. You can get a decent lobster roll at your corner deli or mom-and-pop diner. Ask Mainers to name their favorite lobster roll, and they are bound to have a favorite shack. Luke realized that New York was ripe for an introduction to a real Maine lobster roll. “It was more than just missing a lobster roll. I was missing Maine. I was missing something that I was very proud about; this was an opportunity to bring my passions, work with my father.”
While Luke did all of the early legwork to build the business, his partner, co-owner, Ben Conniff, a fellow Yankee from Connecticut, got the operations off the ground. Ben had been working as a freelancer writing for Smithsonian, Saveur, Playboy, and Yankee when he responded Luke’s ad on Craigslist. Ben immediately got Luke’s vision for the business and was eager and willing to work hard to make it happen. As they set about opening their flagship shop in the East Village in October of 2009, they imagined a spot where people could go for a breather and get a taste of that Vacationland atmosphere in Manhattan. “It’s kind of a way to escape when the city is bearing down on you, as it tends to do,” Ben explains. “Giving people that kind of outlet where they can relax and still be eating lobster which historically in New York is thought of as a luxury, white-tablecloth product that’s not affordable to regular folks.”
Luke’s slogan is “From ME to you,” with the “ME” set in a little outline of his home state, and that promise is born out both in the shop and on “Nauti,” their cheery buttercup and periwinkle painted truck. “We bring all the seafood, the buns, the soda, the soups, the water; the only thing that doesn’t come from Maine really is the chips and the paper products. Everything within the restaurant is Maine-based. It’s decorated with my old traps, my old buoys, ropes, and nets. That’s where the color tone comes from. The blue and yellow is the color of my old buoys.”
The menu both at the shop and on the truck is simple: lobster rolls, crab rolls, and shrimp rolls, all sourced and processed by Luke’s father. The rolls are prepared the way Luke would eat them at home. Top-split hot dog buns are buttered, toasted, and then filled with chilled claw and knuckle meat, the sweetest most tender lobster meat available. Dressed with only a touch of lemon butter and a dusting of seasoning, customers can get their rolls with a stripe of mayo or go naked. “The top-split bun is important, so you get a good buttery crunch with each bite, but it’s really about having fresh Maine lobster.”
Lobster sourcing is an important component of Luke’s business and a point of pride. “It’s relatively easy to source a product for three or four months a year and that’s why there’s a lot of these shacks that open up in vacation areas up and down the East Coast for three or four months of the year and then they close down,” says Luke. “It just becomes very, very difficult if you don’t have a direct connection to the source, to be consistent throughout the year. Knowing that and knowing how much time we spend on the ground level to make sure that we’re doing things right and we’re using the connections we’ve had for fifty years to do things right, it just becomes a very difficult game to jump in and out of. With lobster it becomes very, very hard to source the product at a fair price and a decent quality from December to June.”
Because Luke’s seafood is sourced through his dad, they can tell you the catch and the harbor where each lobster came from. The lobsters are shelled and steamed within hours of being caught. “Once a lobster is actually brought from the ocean it starts to eat the proteins within itself, so it starts to not be nearly as sweet, so it’s really important to get from the ocean to your plate,” Luke explains.
Spending even just a few minutes with Luke, it’s clear the man knows his lobster. He can look at a lobster and tell if it’s new shell or old shell, male or female, and fresh or frozen. Quality and flavor depends on several factors: age, season, and time of the lobster year—whether the lobsters are in their old shell or growing into their new one. Lobsters that weigh from a pound to about a pound and three-quarters are the sweetest lobsters. “Once you get above a pound and three-quarters, the meat can get a little fishy and a little bit tougher. The best-quality meat comes from the shedders. Lobsters shed every year, and that meat is always the sweetest; it’s the most delicate, the lobster itself is the most delicate,” says Luke. When pressed on what kind of lobster is the best, Luke answers without hesitation. “The best possible lobster you can eat is probably a pound and a half, male, shedder. The reason I say male is that you can actually tell whether a lobster is male or female just by looking at its claws. Its claws tend to be a little bit thicker and the pincher claw doesn’t tend to be as pointy, so there’s just a little more meat in the claws in a male lobster.”
With the mission of bringing lobster to the people, it wasn’t long before they sought out a more mobile delivery method. “There are so many markets in New York that are high demand for a short period of time, and then that demand goes away,” says Ben. “Midtown is the perfect example. There’s a real dearth of affordable food here that you can get quickly. Having the truck allows you to serve that need without necessarily paying astronomical rents on a space that’s only going to be working really two to three hours a day. It’s also just a great way to move around and see new people all the time and just really expand your audience and get your food in front of more people. It was an exciting thing to do and the fact that we have an existing infrastructure to launch it from was very helpful, as opposed to trying to figure out how to organize all of your products and making a business without any home base.” Nauti hit the streets in March of 2011 and has been bringing rolls to on-the-go lunchers around town ever since, converting lunchtime truck customers into neighborhood regulars at their Upper East Side and Upper West Side outposts.
Street vending is not without its challenges. Between the costs of the permits, assembling the right team of workers with all the proper licenses, and the daily drama of battling for parking spots, it’s a hard business to grow as successfully as they’ve grown their brick-and-mortar locations, which number eight and counting, five in the city and three run by Luke’s brother in the Washington, DC area. “We’re very happy with our current truck,” says Ben. “We’re happy with how much new attention it’s gotten us and obviously the rave reviews. It was Zagat’s number one food truck, and that’s been awesome, but we’re not necessarily looking to expand the truck model.” While there might not be a fleet of trucks on the immediate horizon, Ben sees a promising future. Ben continues, “Because of our source through Luke’s father and also because of the quality of the team we’ve been able to build, it’s been very scalable to the extent that there’s just been zero decline in quality. And as long as we can confidently say that, there’s no reason to think we should stop trying to reach new people, new markets, and places that have less exposure to Maine lobster and lobster rolls.”
BEN: For age, a lobster becomes mature and we’re able to catch in Maine at seven years. It’s a little bit bigger than a pound lobster. It’s actually a measurement of the shell of the lobster, it corresponds to about seven years and a pound, a little more than a pound. Lobsters from that weight to about a pound and three-quarters are the sweetest lobsters.
LUKE: Once a lobster is actually brought from the ocean, it starts to eat the proteins within itself, so it starts to not be nearly as sweet. So it’s really important to get it from the ocean to your plate. One way to tell how long a lobster has been out of the water is that lobsters are carnivorous, so they’ll eat each other very quickly, so if they’ve got the bands on, they’ll start to eat their antennae. So a lot of times in grocery stores you’ll see that they have short antennae, and that’s because they’ve been eating their antennae.
BEN: We use Country Kitchen buns. They’re out of Lewiston, Maine. The really important thing with the split-top and the shaved sides is the way it toasts out. You’ve got to get butter on the outside of the bun, griddle both sides, and when you do that, it sort of holds in the warmth, even on the inside. You open up the bun and steam comes out. It just becomes this really soft-onthe-inside, crispy-on-the-outside, buttery, kind of cradle for the seafood. You bite into it, and it kind of melts away in your mouth. It’s really the perfect way to serve it. You can’t get anything closer with any other type of bread.
LUKE: The claw and knuckle is the sweetest, most tender part of the lobster. The tail is tougher without a doubt, and it can be a little bit fishier. We just take the knuckle and claw meat.
BEN: Straight chilled meat with just the mayo on the inside. First of all, that allows us to serve a roll with no mayo for people who don’t like mayo, which is a ton of people actually (including Luke). And second, keeping those components separate just allows you to get a better taste for the lobster. It’s not going to be sitting in that mayonnaise over time, which gets kind of gross.
LUKE: There’s so much naiveness in the market, and there’s so many folks who can’t tell the difference between a fresh lobster and a pounded lobster. A Maine lobster and a Canadian lobster, even more significantly. Same species, similar product, but there’s a reason we’re using Maine product and not Canadian product and that is because we’re trying to support the sustainable industry that Maine’s practicing. For so many people it’s just about lobster—it’s not about where it comes from, what it tastes like, what it looks like, and that’s kind of wrong.
Adapted from Luke Holden’s recipe
Shrimp rolls at Luke’s Lobster are prepared in the same manner as the lobster rolls, just chilled whole shrimp with a touch of lemon butter and mayo and a dash of seasonings. “The whole point is to make it really simple, just a tiny bit of an accent to bring out the flavor of the seafood,” says co-owner, Ben Conniff. “Unlike your typical shrimp you get anywhere else, the flavor of Maine shrimp is packed into each little one. They’re so nice and sweet and tender. Just like good lobster, you don’t want to cover that up at all.” Even Luke himself admits “The shrimp roll is my favorite. The shrimp are different than shrimp people typically eat. They’re little baby shrimp—that’s what we catch up in the Gulf of Maine. They’re actually not baby shrimp. They’re shorter; they’re smaller; they’re sweeter. The texture is a little better than a cocktail shrimp. For me, those are just as tasty as a lobster.”
6 tablespoons salted butter
4 split-top hot dog buns
1 pound cooked Maine shrimp, peeled, deveined, and chilled
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
4 teaspoons mayonnaise, if desired
pinch of celery salt
salt, to taste
pepper, to taste
Place butter in a medium microwave-safe bowl, cover with waxed paper, and microwave on high for 10 to 15 seconds, stir, re-cover, and repeat in 10-second bursts until butter has completely melted. Brush outsides of buns with butter. Whisk together remaining butter with lemon juice and set aside.
Grill buns in a large skillet over medium-high heat 2 to 3 minutes or until both sides are golden.
If desired, spread a teaspoon of mayonnaise on the inside of each bun, then fill with chilled shrimp. Reheat lemon butter for 10 seconds in the microwave, if it has congealed and drizzle over each roll. Top with a pinch of celery salt as well as salt and pepper to taste and serve immediately.
Note: Sweet Maine shrimp have a short fishery season that starts in January and ends in February. But fear not, flash-frozen shrimp are just as good, if not better to use as Luke says the shrimp is “actually harder to work with when it’s fresh—all the proteins from fresh shrimp give it a strange odor.”