Great Lobster Roll Quest, Part 2 - Guilford Mooring, (Guilford) Dockside Seafood and Grill (Branford, CT)

Guilford Harbor, toward Sluice Creek

Sunday was what I'd call a pouty day - big, fluffy banks of gray clouds blanketing the sky, hanging just a few inches above the water horizon.  Guilford Harbor is beautiful.  Greys and blues, dashed and blotched across water and sky, interleaved with swatches of grass, land, and tree.  It felt surprisingly good to look out over the ruffled water, feel a gentle, temperate breeze and watch a few, optimistic boats bob along the docks.  It has been a long, bone-wearying winter.

Unexpectedly, a potato roll!
The object of our desire, the Guilford Lobster Pound, was not open, but the Guilford Mooring next door was, and they had a hot lobster roll!  This spot wasn't on my original list, but what the hell, we're on a great lobster roll quest, so try it.  At $18 even, you get a nice amount of lobster in a yellow potato roll with fries.  The potato roll was an interesting twist I hadn't anticipated.  While the lobster pieces were large and chunky, tasty and buttery, the potato roll was dense, doughy, and vaguely sweet. It had been toasted unevenly and not enough to leave a good, solid crust.  Within a few seconds of the dish landing on our table, the roll was quite soggy.  It was also a bit too doughy and sweet against the delicate flavor of the lobster for my tastes.  These subtleties leave a hot lobster roll connoisseur pining, but the large buttered lobster chunks were quite tasty and would easily win over most lobster fans.

Guilford Mooring's hot lobster roll

Also tried the Mooring's crabcake, and wasn't terribly impressed.  It was also on the soggy side, and I prefer larger chunks of crabmeat, which this one did not have.

Interlude: grilled orange bourbon cocktail...

We decided to take in a second course over at the Stone House, across the street, and along the way, learned that the building had once been the town fish market, converted in the '50s to a restaurant.  In 2011, after Hurricane Irene, the owners renovated, resulting in a very comfortable, pleasant setting.  The menu is interesting, a little more than just your average seafood and steak type place, and the cocktail menu was quite interesting.  I had a grilled orange bourbon concoction, where the bite and smoke of Four Roses bourbon played nicely with the sweetness of the orange.  An orange slice was literally grilled, twisted onto a plastic skewer, and floated in the cocktail.  I'm not sure I tasted so much as thought the grilled flavor, but being a bourbon fan, I found it lovely nonetheless.  We also sampled the lobster mac n cheese, which didn't quite have the softness and creaminess I would expect from one of the ultimate comfort foods of the universe, but it wasn't bad, and we polished it off.

With our full bellies, we took a small walking tour around the immediate vicinity of this part of Guilford Harbor where Sluice Creek empties into a small marina at the end of Famers Wharf Rd.  

Copper, cedar, steel, and concrete

Wilfred Armster's "Spaceship" condominiums received a large part of our attention.  The large, high, rounded, copper-clad disc of a front perches atop a huge steel beam, on a bermed piece of land and is the most eye-catching thing for miles.  It's a cheeky building, taking a strong stance amidst the proper Colonial style buildings all around it.  In fact, not but a few feet adjacent to it is a nice, standard New England Colonial house that makes the Spaceship appear even cheekier than it might standing alone.  The modern looking structure was done in 1989 or thereabouts, and you can find the full story in a Google search for "Armster, Spaceship, Guilford."  Cool stuff.

The Spaceship.  Wilfred Armster, architect.

We continued on along beautifully scenic Route 146 into Branford, looking for our next stop, the Dockside Seafood and Grill Restaurant.  Literally surrounded by plastic-wrapped boats at the time of our visit, the restaurant is a stand-alone building tucked into the Johnson Marina on Block Island Road in the Indian Head area of Branford.  We were seated at a comfortable high top bar table facing the water, and immediately got down to the business of lobster rolls.  For $17.95, the lobster roll comes with large, meaty chunks on a grilled top-loader roll.  The normal inclusions are the requisite small cup of cole slaw, and fries or rice pilaf.  We asked for a substitution and received perfectly steamed broccoli, not at all mushy, but fully cooked.  The lobster meat was good and hefty, but it didn't really stand out.  The problem may have been the butter whose flavor was oddly weak.  I wasn't even sure there was much butter on the roll at all.  As we all know, one of the primary reasons we eat lobster is for the butter, so this weak butter issue was somewhat vexing. 

Dockside Seafood and Grill hot lobster roll

Grilled or toasted?
The grilled bun was a revelation, though not exactly a positive one.  As it turns out, the lesson the grilled bun teaches is that a well toasted bun holds up to the inherent sogginess of the hot buttered lobster better than a grilled bun does.  Grilling doesn't quite provide the crust and texture to the roll that can make the lobster roll experience sing.  Typically, as you finish a lobster roll, the last thing you taste is a lot of bread.  If you had the choice of a last bite of soft, soggy bread versus a piece of crusty, slightly chewy but still crunchy, toast-y goodness soaked with just the right amount with butter and lobster juice, which would you choose?

The blog lives! And lobsters.

It's fascinating to read over posts from 5 years ago and feel like they are still somewhat relevant.  At least to me.  As any writer knows, even before the creative process of crafting prose and lyrical sentences, the act of writing is a way of thinking and clarifying, making sense of thoughts and experiences.  In the case of this online journal, I get to see myself over time, and see a shape, a definition of self that wouldn't be clear any other way.  I can have a dialogue with myself, confirming what I was, reviewing what I am, creating a self out of chaos.  And, lord, what a lot of chaos there is.

The current chaos really isn't that awful in perspective.  I'm trying to sell my house, and things aren't going super smoothly.  It's been on the market for over six months now, and I'm fed up.  I have things to do, places to be, people to see, and a need for liquid assets!  I had a buyer at one point, but that person backed out, leaving a puddle of disgruntlement in her wake. 

Lemons and lemonade.

So I am still in this place.  While I am here, I will try to make the most of it.  Hence, the Great Lobster Roll Quest.  Of course.  What else do you do when you're in Connecticut and you're staring at yet another year wrapping around the corner, and you haven't moved yet?  Take advantage of local food!

So, Connecticut is home of the hot lobster roll.  This should include a toasted bun, copious hot lobster meat, freshly picked, drizzled with butter.  That's pretty much it.  It shouldn't be that hard, right?  I mean, how could you make it worse?

Ah-hah.  Firstly, you could use frozen lobster meat and then microwave or reboil it.  Secondly, you might not properly toast your buns.  Not toasting the bread at all would be a serious mistake.  Thirdly, and this is a matter of opinion, you put stuff on top of the buttered lobster meat, like chives or something.  There are a few other miscreant things you could do to sully the pristine hot lobster roll concept, including wrapping the lobster roll in foil to be sold at concession stands.  I applaud the idea as a good, capitalist, savvy marketing, business move, but the gastronomic result is decidedly subpar.

In any case, with this first re-inaugural Toe in the Water blogpost, I begin the Great Lobster Roll Quest, with a somewhat limited scope.  We're sticking to the Connecticut shoreline, north of New Haven up to the Rhode Island border.

Johnny Ad's, Old Saybrook

I was pretty psyched when I came up with the idea.  (And also inanely pleased with myself for circumventing an arduous, downward-spiraling self-pity party when my house did not sell.)  So, the evening I came up with this, I took myself over to the closest lobster shack-y place I could find, Johnny Ad's in Old Saybrook, right on Route 1.

Johnny Ad's is a no-frills kind of place.  Nautical grey siding, indoor and outdoor seating, laminate tables, vinyl cushioned seats on the inside, picnic tables out the outside.  It's informal.  The service is simple and easy: walk inside to what is essentially an indoor order-taking walk-up window counter.  Scan the menus posted on the wall, go to the register to order and pay.  Take your number, wait for your order to come up.  I've always thought of it as a summer place, but it turns out, it's open year-round.  They have many other wonderful things to eat besides lobster rolls, but my mission requires single-mindedness.  

The lobster roll

For $16.95, you get a hot buttered lobster roll with a side cup of coleslaw, and a lemon wedge.  The lobster roll was hot.  It was buttery.  The bun was a typical top-loader (also known as a New England style roll, a square-ish piece of white bread as opposed to the American Style, or side-loader, with rounded ends - O Wikipedia, love of my life, I am proud to be a contributor.)  The bun was toasted to perfection, slightly greasy, but not toasted with butter all over it.  The lobster meat was really, really hot.  I was so excited about embarking on my quest, I didn't really think about what the meat was, and I chowed down with relish (figuratively). 

In retrospect, I believe the meat was really hot because it had been microwaved.  This is something I can't confirm, but perhaps as the quest goes on I'll get a better sense for what is microwaved lobster meat and what isn't.  What I did note was that the meat seemed to be all claw meat.  Some of it was rather spongy.  It was still tasty, but the bun could have taken a little more meat.  The quantity of butter was excellent.

General review: In the dead of winter, I would eat their lobster roll to quench a craving.  It may require a mid or late summer visit to get a really good sense of just how good Johnny Ad's hot lobster roll truly is.

Fun lobster fact of the day: Lobsters have blue-tinted blood on account of being copper-rich.