“We’ll start with six lobster rolls,” the man in sunglasses and madras shorts said when he reached the front of the line at McLoons Lobster Shack on the tip of Sprucehead Island in Maine.
That was only his opening bid. By the time everyone in his family had weighed in, his lobster roll count was up to nine.
There are other things on the menu at McLoons — chowders and burgers and grilled littleneck clams — but the lobster roll outsells them all by far.
On the Sunday in July I spent at McLoons, in South Thomaston, Me., the place never got truly mobbed. The sky was the color of a fishing sinker and everyone knew an afternoon thunderstorm was on the way. But still they came, the locals and the visitors, almost all of them with the same thing in mind. As Mariah Watkinson, who was working the order window, put it, “There’s usually a lobster roll in every order.”
In 2012, McLoons Lobster Shack’s first season, its manager, Bree Birns, worked almost completely alone and sold about 40 lobster rolls a day. Now, on a busy summer day, the shack will make 500 of them, and she needs 10 full-time workers and 16 part-timers to keep up.
In the intervening 13 years, the demand for lobster rolls has been pushed higher and higher by forces that are often external to Maine. Entrepreneurs in New York City and Los Angeles, taking advantage of deflated lobster prices and the ascent of trucks, stalls and windows devoted to affordable, portable treats, helped build a vast, urban audience for the sandwich. One of these businesses, Luke’s Lobster, now sells about a million lobster rolls a year at its shacks in 12 states, Singapore and Japan.
Meanwhile, the ways Americans thought and talked about food evolved, and it came to be seen as normal to draw up vacation plans around bucket-list restaurants and rankings of, for instance, the 20 best lobster rolls on the coast of Maine.
“When I was a kid we had lobster rolls, but they weren’t A Thing,” said Ms. Birns, who spent her childhood south of Portland, in Cape Elizabeth. For decades, she said, tourists usually wanted to crack open at least one whole steamed lobster before heading home. As the lobster roll attained celebrity status, she said, “it kind of became the thing that people come to Maine for.”
Except for the spruce trees and the granite blocks, just about everything you can see from a picnic table at McLoons is there to meet that demand. The fishing boats moored just off shore, the dock where lobstermen unload their catch, the refurbished bait house where portions of meat are parceled out and the shack itself — all play a part in the elaborate mechanics by which the harvest of a rugged and sometimes dangerous trade is transformed into a hand-held symbol of summer, at $28.95 a pop.
On the Water
Blair Drinkwater spent most of the day before on his boat, Good Scout, checking his traps for lobsters and binding the claws of the ones he caught with rubber bands to keep them from tearing each other apart in the live tank on the way to shore.
Good Scout is one of about a dozen boats that sell lobsters to McLoons. They all have licenses from the state that tell them how many traps they can keep in the water at one time. (For most, that number is 800.) The state doesn’t tell the crews where they can set their traps, though. That is governed by custom. The stretch of coastline a lobsterman plies is usually the one his father worked; for Mr. Drinkwater, it is the sea around an uninhabited island where his grandfather once lived.
“It’s where you were born and raised,” Mr. Drinkwater said. “Your territory is tradition, and people respect that.”
Failure to respect that can lead to arguments on the water. If they are not worked out at sea, they may be brought back to land for a dispute-resolution process that Mr. Drinkwater describes as “guys rolling around in the parking lot.” At other times, no words are exchanged at all. The usual response to finding somebody else’s buoys in your territory is to cut the lines, stranding the traps on the bottom of the ocean.
By these methods, established crews keep their livelihood and newcomers are discouraged. This age-old system applies near the coast, where most Maine lobsters were caught for centuries. Lately, though, for reasons that are still being studied, they aren’t as plentiful near the shore.
“We have evidence that lobsters are moving into deeper water,” said Kathleen Reardon, a biologist for the state Department of Marine Resources.
The boats have been following them, setting their traps miles from land, out where the old territorial claims don’t apply. For the lobstermen, this means longer trips, rougher seas and more money spent on diesel.
Annual lobster landings in Maine have been falling since 2016, but are still far higher than they were during the 20th century. So far, Ms. Reardon said, the state isn’t seeing anything like the population collapse that has brought down the lobster fishery in southern New England.
“They’ve moved offshore but there’s still plenty of product around,” Mr. Drinkwater said. “You can still go make a biscuit.”
On the Docks
When boats sell lobsters to McLoons, the person they see is John Lindahl, the wharf manager. Mr. Lindahl also supplies them with fuel for their tanks and bait for their traps. For years, the bait of choice was the Atlantic menhaden, but recent shortages have led to alternatives.
“Salted pig hide has come on strong in the past few years,” Mr. Lindahl said. Though it’s not widely known off the docks, more and more Maine lobsters eat pork as their last meal. Not that it matters to Mr. Lindahl. Although he has a lobstering license, and his father was a lobsterman, he doesn’t eat lobster.
“I got enough of it as a kid,” he said. When he wanders from his dock to the lobster shack, a walk that takes about three minutes, he orders a burger.
While he was talking, a boat called Game Changer tied up at the wharf. The captain and his two-man crew passed crates made of hard gray plastic over the starboard side. The crates were full of lobsters.
On this day, the going rate was $5.50 a pound for newly molted soft-shell lobsters and $6.50 a pound if they still had their old, hard shells. Many of the specimens the Game Changer brought in weighed around a pound and a quarter. Lobsters in that range hold, on average, about a quarter pound of meat — enough to make a single McLoons lobster roll.
After redistributing a few lobsters to make up four crates of 90 pounds each, Mr. Lindahl ran a nylon rope through the crates’ handles and heaved them off the end of the dock. They bobbed there, lids skimming the surface, the tangled lobsters inside submerged in cold seawater again.
Portioning
One peculiarity of McLoons is that before the lobsters Mr. Lindahl buys on the dock can be turned into lobster rolls, they have to be trucked to Portland to be steamed, chilled and picked clean by hand. The shack is less than 100 yards from the dock but the meat makes a 160 mile detour to get there.
The reason for the zigzagging work flow is water supply. Lobster picking is messy work and the best way to clean up afterward is to hose down the room. The wharf, though, sits on a patch of Spruce Head Island that has no running water. Inefficient as it seems, it makes more sense to pick the lobsters in Portland, at a processing plant owned by Douty Brothers Seafood.
Another oddity of McLoons is that nobody named McLoon works there. Albert Chase McLoon, who built the wharf, died in 1965. When the two Douty brothers, Dick and Doug, bought it in 2003, they brought his name back. Today the wharf and the lobster shack are owned by Dick Douty and his daughter, Ms. Birns.
Before the cleaned meat arrived at the shack, it made a stop inside the old bait shed, where Melissa Grierson and Lisa Archer sorted it into lobster roll-size portions. While a transistor radio on the shelf tuned to a station in Rockland played “Back in Black,” Ms. Grierson demonstrated her method: Spreading a 10-inch square of Handy Wacks polyethylene wrap over a scale, she laid down a tail and two claws, then added knuckles to make up a quarter pound. Then she folded the squares and the packed the parcel into plastic totes.
They started work at about 7 that morning and expected to keep going until about 2 or 3 p.m., at which point they hoped to have a supply that would last until the shack closed at 7.
Like Mr. Lindahl, Ms. Grierson doesn’t care for lobster.
“For me, who doesn’t eat this stuff, it blows my mind how many people just love it,” she said.
The Shack
After the lobster meat had made its way from the boat to the dock to the pickers to the portioners, it was carried to the shack to be united with the three other pieces of a McLoons lobster roll: salted butter from Cabot Creamery, Hellman’s mayonnaise and Ball Park Tailgater split-top buns.
It went like this: David Birns, who is married to Bree, ran a rubber spatula heaped with soft butter along the outer flanks of a bun, then browned it on a hot flat top, one side at a time. When the bun was so shimmering and golden you either had to take its picture or eat it, he passed it down the line to Meredith Pollard. Wasting no time, she pinched open the bun’s inner seam, swabbed a bit of mayonnaise down the middle and topped it with the contents of one of the polyethylene parcels Ms. Grierson and Ms. Archer had made.
Then she left it on the pickup window, where a food runner would retrieve it and ferry it out to its final stop, a picnic table. Five minutes later, it would be gone.
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Pete Wells was the restaurant critic for The Times from 2012 until 2024. He was previously the editor of the Food section.
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