Dining Out: The Lobster Inn

Skip Tollefsen thought he was home free. He thought he had retired and was headed for his second home on a remote Bahamian island. But the tanking real estate market sank that dream, for at least another year. But his bad luck—sorry, Skip—is the good fortune of Hamptonites in search of seafood, because the “Splat” is back.

Mr. Tollefsen’s venerable Lobster Inn is open once again, for the 40th straight summer. The rustically ramshackle waterfront bastion at “the merge” at the eastern end of Sunrise Highway will be the same as always this summer: family friendly, reasonably priced, fresh-off-the-dock, and old-school in the purest sense. The days when restaurants on the East End were never talked about in terms of celebrity sightings and were never compared with Manhattan eateries are alive and well in some few secreted corners of the South Fork, and the Lobster Inn is one of them.

Leave the pretense on the highway, there isn’t much room for it beneath the mounted sharks and swordfish bills adorning the walls of the Lobster Inn. And, just like it was in the old days—the pre-urban new wave 1980s, that is—the seafood comes from local baymen and fish markets, it’s served in big portions and comes at prices that mean the whole family can go out to dinner together and not have to skip the ice cream afterward.

The hatch cover tables and chairs are carved of monstrously thick oak with deep glistening coats of varnish. Nautical tackle and hundreds of photos adorn the walls along with a dozen oil paintings of fishing scenes and old sailing ships that Mr. Tollefsen painted himself—one of his many, many hobbies.

The venerable seafood shack almost didn’t make it to the milestone anniversary. Mr. Tollefsen, worn down by dwindling fish populations that drive up the price and drive down the quality and a redesign of the highway in front of the restaurant that forced some customers to follow a serpentine route along back roads to get back home after dinner, had the whole property on the block for conversion to condominiums. The economic free-fall put an end to that idea and when talks about transforming the property into an ecological education center dragged on into late winter, Mr. Tollefsen and his wife, Karen, realized they were going to have to re-open for another summer. No matter the short notice, or the economy, they say, things will carry on as always. 
“I’ve never had a bad year,” Mr. Tollefsen said, sipping coffee at the bar of the Lobster Inn the day before the Memorial Day weekend crush set in. It would be the last day of quiet at the restaurant for the next 14 weeks, during which the Lobster Inn will be open for lunch and dinner seven days a week. “Of course, I don’t know what this summer will be like.”

Business, in many ways, takes a back seat at the Lobster Inn to Mr. Tollefsen’s fierce community and ecological ethic. The menu prices are years behind those of other restaurants on the inflation ladder, the quality of the fish must be top-notch and never frozen, and certain products are flatly banned because of the unseen and far-flung side effects of their production.

“I won’t sell farm raised shrimp, they feed them cattle food,” Mr. Tollefsen barked. “Same thing with farmed salmon, and the wild is too expensive. I can’t put it on my menu for $30, I can’t do that. I won’t sell frozen. Frozen is where everyone is going now. I won’t do it.”

So the shrimp the Lobster Inn serves is caught in nets in the Gulf of Mexico and never frozen. The steamers, mussels and clams are dug from local bays.

Throw in a crab leg and a lobster tail with those and you have the “Splat,” the house specialty at Lobster Inn. The term is an abbreviation for “shellfish platter for two,” necessitated by the first computer system the restaurant installed two decades ago.

The rest of the menu at the Lobster Inn barely strays from the theme. There are all the classics you would expect at a basically seafood-only restaurant. Steamers, steamed mussels, steamed little neck clams, baked clams, clams casino, fried oysters, squid rings, grilled tidbits of swordfish or tuna, fried clams and shrimp, oysters Rockefeller, coconut shrimp, shellfish samplers and pan-seared yellowfin tuna with peppercorns and Cajun spices.

There are lobsters in every size from 1 pound to 3 pounds on the menu and much larger ones on most nights (up to a monstrous 8 pounds sometimes), all cooked in pressure steamers so the insides don’t burn out.

Entrées like swordfish and tuna steaks, mahi mahi, baked stuffed flounder, sea scallops and stuffed lobster are augmented by some landlubber dishes like sirloin steak and marinated chicken breast. If you want a bit of both there are combinations of steak and lobsters or shrimp. And, of course, there is a salad bar.

Appetizers range from $6.75 (for fried clam strips) to $14.25 (for the steamed shellfish sampler). Entrées run between $16 (chicken) and $42 (three lobster tails). The steak is $28, and the swordfish steak is $22. Lobsters run roughly $22.50 per pound.

At lunch, the entrées are mostly in the form of fresh seafood sandwiches—sliced steak, tuna steak, blackened mahi mahi, swordfish. There’s also burgers and Caesar salads topped with chicken, steak or grilled tuna, and a half cold lobster stuffed with shrimp salad. Lunch dishes run from $11.75 (chicken sandwich) to $19.75 (half lobster or lobster salad platter).