- [Andrew] All my food memories are built around getting
blue crabs in little tide pools on the Cape.
Picking mussels, digging clams,
bringing them home and making chowder:
that's why this concept, this food,
really resonated with me.
- [Mike] We decided on an opportunity to bring a little bit
of technique to the New England coastal fare.
It's already just so codified.
You know what a lobster roll looks like.
You know what clam chowder looks like.
And if we could just kind of tweak things
just a little bit, then we can stand out
or, you know, be a different voice in the conversation.
- I was in Seattle for a while and just fell in love
with Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese cuisine.
I find that the ingredients are like sharp and bright
and just really complement seafood extremely well.
- I absolutely love Japanese food
and particularly the Japanese approach to handling fish.
I think it's really admirable, and if you look
across the globe, we see the same kind of stuff
that they see in Japan coming out of the ocean.
We're taking such a traditionalist cuisine,
like New England coastal fare.
Our goal is to try to turn it on its head,
doing riffs on different cuisines' approach to seafood.
In that respect, we really need every bite to kind of
fire on all cylinders, just like good izakaya food should.
Stuff that's just totally savory.
And is it a little spicy?
Does it have acid?
Is it pretty salty?
Is there a fry-down?
And yes, yes, yes.
And I think that, you know, where that cuisine's successful
I think that maybe we've taken a couple pointers
and we're sort of trying to think along those lines.
- We knew we needed to have a lobster roll
if we were going to open an oyster bar.
It's just one of those things, like,
you don't mess with, really.
So our approach was actually to like take it
so far out of the box that it like
almost wouldn't even be considered a lobster roll.
Very, very few clam shacks or lobster roll places
either pick their own meat or make their own buns.
We do all of that in-house.
We do a sort of Chinese-style steam bun.
It's been both a blessing and a curse
as we've gotten busier.
It's like, "Oh my God, do we really have to hand roll,
you know, 600 buns a day?"
Yes, we do, because nobody makes a split-top steam bun.
In Maine, there's a big debate as to
warm lobster rolls versus cold.
Cold is like lobster salad with mayonnaise.
But there is there this tradition of tossing
lobster meat in warm just-melted butter,
and that's your classic warm lobster roll.
- [Mike] And we were playing around that and then--
- We decided to toss lobster meat in that
warm brown butter vinaigrette over warm lobster.
And it is sort of ironic now, but people say we have
the best lobster roll in Maine, and I'm like,
"Well, it's barely a lobster roll, but it works."
- [Mike] Sure, we'll take it.
- [Andrew] We'll take it. (laughs)
I grew up in the Boston area going to Cape Cod
and going down the coast to Maine
and the smell of fried scallops --
that was like those iconic Cape Cod clam shacks.
It like, I mean, really resonates deeply with me.
I've always been fascinated by scallops.
There's this great tradition in Japanese izakaya restaurants
to do these sort of pancakes or like batter-based custards,
like takoyaki or okonomiyaki,
and we thought we would basically try to do
caramelized scallop in a waffle takoyaki.
So I pureed it, turned it into sort of a waffle batter,
and we put it in a waffle iron,
and you get just tons of caramelized scallop flavor,
which is pretty awesome.
And it's got almost a custardy interior,
like a scallop mousse.
And then we take that and we put all those
wonderful savory ingredients like tare
and make this umami emulsion, onido, nori,
pickled sea vegetables, tempura crispies,
and it just makes this really kind of like
crushable, delicious waffle.
Oyster bars and clam shacks are always something
that we've just really adored, a big part of sort of
New England and New England culture.
There is something so nostalgic about sitting
on a picnic table on the ocean with some fried clams.
- [Mike] And also oysters.
- I would say 90% of the oysters we serve are from Maine.
We do offer usually four to five varieties from away.
Everybody always believes that oysters
from where they're from are the best.
They've gotta be the freshest where you are,
and that is certainly true here.
These oysters have never been on a plane.
They're usually never out of the water
for more than three or four days before they get here,
so they're impeccably fresh.
- I didn't eat a ton of seafood growing up,
but I ate the hell out of fried clams.
That was one thing that my mom and I kind of bonded over:
fried clam rolls, and just piles of fried fish
with nothing but like a single lemon wedge.
It was just, like, absolutely dynamite.
- I think people have a lot of associative memories
of, you know, being on the beach in the summer.
And I think when you're that close to the ocean,
it's kind of what you want to eat.
Memorial Day, it's like, even though it was 50 degrees,
this place was jumping, because I think
everybody wants to get their seafood in.
- It's like white pants and seafood:
Memorial Day.