Lobsters are Not Immortal

In Remembrance of the Red Lobster on Rt. 59, Nanuet NY

To the Red Lobster of Nanuet New York.

I am writing in remembrance of the restaurant I’ve visited more than any other in my life, and the place where I can imagine having a family best. I write these words genuinely sorrowful. What makes anyone love a restaurant? Yes, there is the food. But long before patrons eat, they must take the steps through the front doors and exist in the restaurant space. You, Red Lobster in Nanuet, understood this. You understood that the first seconds in a space are the ignition of experience.

You had two sets of double doors. You were fancy that way. The first set of doors led to a kind of mud room, a carpeted cozy in-between with wooden walls. We’d step through those first doors and know we were on the precipice. In a liminal space between hungry and sated. The sounds of the highway already sealed and gone, the chatter of the the restaurant getting louder.

And then we’d take that step and be inside proper. What did it feel like to step through your second set of doors? It felt like, suddenly, I was a sea-trained sailor, finally aboard ship after a long stint on land, that false home, that solid prison. I don’t know if it was the darkened windows, the wood dominant design, the, I suppose, decorative barrels and frayed ropes that sold us the dream, but when I stepped in the Red Lobster on route 59 in Nanuet as a child and later on as a man, I felt I was an adventurer just before voyage. On ship, soon untethered from the troubles of the world. When I stepped into your belly I was the sailor ready for his meal. One owed a bounty that suddenly felt as if it was birthright.

Those who have ever been to a Red Lobster are probably waiting for me to speak about what I consider the aesthetic pièce de résistance: the lobster tank. As we grow older the tank and the world and everything in it shrinks, but as a ten-year-old the lobster tank is the sea itself. Water trapped in glass and teeming with sharp clawed crustaceans. The watery cage felt like a peephole into the larger, darker world. As an older person, it felt like a necessary cruelty, a shrine to the life that we so often forget is sacrificed for every meal. Life to life. Life for life. At the Red Lobster on route 59 in Nanuet they did not run from death. Death was in the restaurant’s name. The Lobster tank seemed to say, “Those slow moving things with the blue rubber bands restraining them, and shells that were mostly blue and black, just pokes of red at the tail and claw… those things are alive now, but soon they’ll be dead, bright red because you, sailor, need to be sustained.” Death serving life, life forging death. The lobster tank in the front of the Red Lobster was a brutal truth telling.

“How many are with you today?” for us, for a long time, the answer was always five. The person at the front of house would take us further into your heart. And by then the smell would have made my mouth water. We sat down five people, combinations of the same genetic code swimming in all of us. We’d go to you Red Lobster, together, unified in glorious anticipation. Maybe it was my sister’s birthday or mine or Mother’s Day. Red Lobster on Nanuet, you were our truest ritual.

Before the food came were your biscuits. THEE Biscuits. The Server would drop them on the table knowing they’d brought a great prize to us. Cheddar bay biscuits, another name for glory. Our children hands would tackle each other trying to grab a fluff of golden flavor. It would be our first bite and with a first bite like that, salty, soft, we’d feel deeply in our hearts : fuck the monarchs, we are all from the oldest family, we are all kings of something.

And then we would feast. “Ultimate” was my mother’s choice. Lobster tails dressed in gleaming butter and potatoes shining in the same outfit. You had fried clams and crackers for chowder thick and rich. You were the snap, crack and suck of crab legs, and of course you, you, you and your shrimp: Grilled shrimp, popcorn scrimp, Walt’s favorite shrimp, shrimp on pasta soaked in Alfredo, shrimp that danced with bright flavored scampi. We ate of you and felt complete.

Whatever the occasion was, I would order the Seaside shrimp Trio (before it was even a named thing on the menu) because I had discovered an optimal set of choices from the “Choose Any Three” part of you offerings. That was another thing you gave us: Freedom, flexibility. You were special.

In May of 2024 dozens of Red Lobsters closed abruptly. Probably due to the greed of some C-Suite person somewhere. Perhaps the closings are an aftershock of pandemic. You were lost to us in one of these closings. I don’t know what happened. But what I do know is you, Red Lobster on Route 59 , Nanuet, New York , you were our truest ritual. You dared to ask in unabated and unwavering gluttony, what if shrimp was endless? You employed so many of my friends, you were a place for meetings, a place to grab some lunch in case, after the chemotherapy my father had a taste for something familiar, something salty, cheesy. No one likes being broken up with, but would you rather cry with or without some cheddar bay biscuits, you asked. And when, finally, I was the one with the car, the one rounding us who share blood you asked, “Table for four?” And you did so so kindly it only hurt a little.

Nowadays I often sit in restaurants with great distinctions, enough Michelin stars to draw their own constellations. But no restaurant has ever made me feel the way you did. Before sickness and death swept through my family, you bound us. You stamped us. And you foreshadowed all that was to come with your tank. You brought us together and said yes, yes, you broken fools, you are a family too.

And for that, although you have unceremoniously been taken from us, I would like to say, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.