The mission of this small restaurant—along with its older sibling in the East Village—seems to be to take the lobster-roll mass market. Note its relatively low price point—fourteen dollars, compared to thirty at some of its competitors—and utter simplicity of preparation: top-sliced bun, buttered and toasted, a light smear of mayo, a full quarter pound of lobster meat, a shake of what’s mostly celery salt, a drizzle of lemon-infused butter. (Luke Holden, one of the restaurants’ co-owners, gave away the recipe recently on the “Today” show, as Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford cooed over his baby face.) Luke’s even offers a frequent-roll club: buy ten, get one free. So far, the strategy is working. On a recent evening, the line to order extended out the door and down the sidewalk, with one double-parking customer causing a noisy traffic jam: the urban version of foghorns sounding off the coast.
Holden’s family owns a seafood-processing plant in Maine, and he calls his roll the first fully traceable one in New York. (A sign at the register notes the provenance of that day’s catch.) In a spot predicated on authenticity—so much is sourced from Maine, from the buns to the soup to the soda, that it feels blasphemous to discover that the Miss Vickie’s chips are made by Frito-Lay, in Dallas—there’s an awful lot of nautical kitsch. Surrounded by lobster traps, a “Gone Fishin’ ” sign, a life preserver, a seashore mural, claw saltshakers, and a crustacean statuette labelled “Please don’t feed the lobster!,” you feel as though you’ve stumbled into a Down East Applebee’s.
Still, crowds rarely lie. The shrimp and crab rolls are stuffed full of juicy seafood, and are even more affordable than the signature roll; the clam chowder and the lobster bisque are both admirable renditions, though diners might want to save them for cooler weather. Of course, most people are there for the main item, and it delivers. The only drawback to its straightforward presentation is that if the hand doing the seasoning happens to lay it on a little heavy, there’s not much to mitigate it. To conclude a meal, it might make sense to order lobster tracks—red-tinged chocolate-caramel cups in vanilla ice cream—but to do so you have to rejoin the snaking line. It’s a conundrum that has driven some customers to take matters into their own hands: cupcakes from Two Little Red Hens, just up the avenue, with a mascot more Rhode Island than Maine. (Open daily for lunch and dinner. Entrées $7-$20.) ♦
