Lobstah Pushah

Having spent many, many summers of my formative years in small town Massachusetts, I can say one thing for certain:

Nothing, absolutely nothing, beats a roadside lobster roll.

Some folks love their po'boys, others can't get enough of their muffalettas. Folks 'round Pittsburgh like their sandwiches piled high with things best left on the side. But for me, nothing will ever compare to the perfect, elegant simplicity of a lobster roll.

I mean, do I even have to mention that it's a sandwich made out of lobster? For crying out loud, what could be better than that?

Though I can't believe that New York or Washington DC has anything approaching the quality of what you can get in good ol' Massachussets, I'm glad to see that the good people of those cities are trying to get their hands and mouths around them.

Even if it does require guerrila action.

Using the moniker Dr. Claw, the thirtysomething chef began boiling batches of lobsters in his home kitchen and using the meat in rolls he sold—without the requisite licenses and permit—in Greenpoint, a Brooklyn neighborhood populated by Polish Americans and an ever-increasing numbers of hipsters. In order to skirt the law, Claw—whose real name is widely published but whom I chose not to identify here so that he could speak freely to me—devised a system that would be the envy of even the most enterprising drug dealers on The Wire. Claw’s customers first had to friend him on Facebook. Then, if they checked out, Claw would provide the potential customer with a phone number, exchange texts when the roll was ready, and hand off the goods in a plain brown bag.

Claw says he initially sold the food out of his apartment. Only after he had to move his sales to the streets did he go from mere chef-entrepreneur to the self-styled “lobstah pushah.” “I can’t take credit for any of it, I’ve got to be honest,” Claw said in an early October interview conducted over coffee and donuts at the Peter Pan Bakery in Greenpoint. “I was forced to do it on the street because the fire department came and my landlord didn’t want me to do it at my place. So I was all bummed out. I mean, half of [the draw of buying lobster rolls] was coming into my nautical-themed apartment. It was literally underground—downstairs—and it was cool.

“And then this kid came up to me and just did this thing—he walked this way and I just walked that way,” Claw says, motioning, “and everything was just born out of that moment. I was like, ‘That kid has clearly bought drugs on the street before. He knows the system.’ I don’t even know how the money just ended up in my hand. He’s got the roll. And we didn’t say a word.”