New York’s best lobster rolls: Not the most expensive

New York City claims to have some of the country’s best lobster rolls, said Ryan Sutton in Bloomberg.com. It certainly has a lot of them. The problem: Many restaurants’ rolls “are little more than expensive tuna salad sandwiches: bland, flavorless, limp.” A good lobster roll is simply boiled or steamed meat on a split-top bun with a “dollop of mayonnaise” and fries or potato chips on the side. Anything else is doing it the “wrong way.” After sampling the offerings at 16 places across the city, I found that some of the best “cost half as much as New York’s best-known lobster rolls.”

Red Hook Lobster Pound

The best. These $15 plumpers are so good that “if Thomas Keller served them he’d get a Michelin star.” Made simply with lemon, salt, butter, and paprika. The flesh is “so delicate it’s like biting into meringue.” 284 Van Brunt St., Brooklyn (646) 326-7650

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Luke’s

Luke Holden, the 25-year-old proprietor of two East Side locations, has his lobster steamed in Maine and shipped directly. “Only claw and knuckle meat is used—it’s much more tender than the tail,” and at $14, it’s a deal. 93 E. Seventh St. and 242 E. 81st St.

Pearl Oyster Bar

At $27, this roll’s not cheap, but the “cholesterol-heavy crustacean collapses in the mouth just a bit more easily” than those priced similarly elsewhere. 18 Cornelia St., (212) 691-8211