Our New Favorite Way to Grill a Lobster

There's a reason lobster is the meal, not just a meal, around here. Nobody serves lobster on a weeknight without meaning something by it, whether it’s a birthday, a homecoming, the first warm weekend of the summer. It's the rare food that turns dinner into an event just by showing up: the bibs, the crackers, the newspaper on the table, the collective willingness to get a little messy for something this good. We've never met a New Englander who didn't have a strong opinion about how to cook one, and honestly, we love that. Few foods carry that much regional pride in a single bite.

Lobster wasn't always the guest of honor, though. Long before it was a splurge, it was a staple. Wampanoag and other coastal peoples had been harvesting it for centuries before European settlers arrived, and in colonial New England it was so plentiful that it washed up on shore by the ton after a storm. It was considered so lowly, in fact, that it was fed to servants, prisoners, and children, and some early contracts even capped how many meals a week an indentured servant could be served lobster. Nobody wanted to eat it more than they had to. It wasn't until the rise of railroads in the mid-1800s, when lobster could travel inland still very much alive, that people outside New England discovered what the rest of us had been sitting on the whole time. From there, it climbed steadily up the menu, from cheap canned filler to the centerpiece it is today.

Which brings us to this recipe, one that's become a new house favorite, and not without a fight for the title. We put it up against a table of certified, opinionated, born-and-raised New Englanders who have views about lobster preparation, and it won. The trick is the char: a hot grill (or broiler, in a pinch) gets real color and smoke on the shell and the meat both, which is a flavor plain water steaming can never give you. Then the butter does its work, lemon for brightness, cumin for warmth and a little earthy depth you don't expect but won't stop thinking about. Together they don't mask the lobster, they amplify it; that first bite is smoky, tangy, and unmistakably, sweetly lobster, all at once. We haven't gone back to a plain steamer since.