“The customers, especially the tourists, didn’t want the experience, they didn’t want the ritual of eating a whole lobster,’’ he said. “I was stunned.’’
Instead, they wanted what Mainers call, with some derision, “Lazy Man Lobster.’’
They didn’t want to deal with all the messy stuff; they had no interest in “earning’’ their meal. They just wanted to eat it.
“My boys spent their summers shucking meat,’’ Hathaway said, and shook his head.
Then one day Hathaway learned about an accidental discovery down in Louisiana and, in that old spirit of Yankee ingenuity, wondered if it could be used to make Lazy Man Lobster even lazier.
Live lobsters in hand, he got on a plane to investigate.
What had happened in Louisiana is that an oysterman had been experimenting with high pressure processing, a technique that uses extreme water pressure to kill off bacteria and parasites, in an effort to increase the shelf life for the oysters, when he discovered the process had an added side benefit: it shucked the oyster.
When Hathaway placed his live lobsters inside the oysterman’s machine, several things happened. The lobster came out looking exactly as it had before it went in, only it was no longer alive. But inside the lobster, the change was dramatic: the pressure had forced the meat to detach from the exoskeleton, which meant that when the shell was cracked, the meat slid out whole, undamaged, but still raw.
“It was amazing,’’ Hathaway said of that moment when he first held raw lobster meat. Previously, it was nearly impossible to get usable lobster meat out of the shell without cooking it, or at least blanching it.
As Hathaway looked down at the meat in his hand, which had come out so perfectly that you could still trace the bumps along the inside of the claws, he had a thought: This is going to revolutionize the way the world eats Maine lobster.
In short order, Hathaway found a used high-pressure processor in Australia, bought it, and, in 2005, opened up Shucks Maine Lobster in a former golf shoe factory in Richmond. Then he tried to figure out what to do with this new ability to extract raw lobster meat.
