From my patio seat at Vola’s Dockside Grill in Alexandria (101 N. Union St.; 703-935-8890), I can see the MGM National Harbor casino standing tall across the river. As I lay waste to a lobster roll and Old Bay fries, watching the locals trying to enjoy a Sunday afternoon in Old Town, many without masks, I can identify with the gamblers on the other side of the Potomac. These days, dining out can feel as risky as dropping your life’s savings into a slot machine, one coin after another.
Based on the activity along the waterfront, I have to assume many in Alexandria are, like me, struggling to come to grips with a carefree summer that is anything but. Families stroll along the boardwalk, their hands sticky with melted ice cream from the sugar cones in their hands. Young men and women, dressed to amplify their bodies, have neglected the most important accessory in a pandemic, the one that will hide their flirtatious smiles. Elderly couples occupy park benches, feeling the cool breeze off the water and hoping everyone maintains their distance.
Many are clearly trying to hold on to some sliver of summer, and I get it. We have been stripped of so much, whether out of fear or emergency government edicts: trips, concerts, outdoor festivals, family cookouts, water parks, baseball, state fairs, even Willie Nelson’s annual Fourth of July Picnic, which was virtual this year. Life is not meant to be experienced via Zoom on a comfortable couch.
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Food is inextricably connected with summer, and few dishes evoke the season better than the lobster roll, its buttery split bun griddled and overflowing with claw and knuckle meat, either drizzled with clarified butter or lightly dressed with mayo. The roll’s popularity during summer has less to do with the seasonality of the star ingredient — you can buy lobster year-round — than it does with the weather patterns in Maine, home to the biggest, sweetest crustaceans in America. I can’t think of many folks who’d want to occupy a picnic table outside a Maine lobster shack in November, when the catch is still fine but the weather isn’t.
My love for lobster rolls is sort of inexplicable. I didn’t grow up eating them. I’ve never even been to Maine, let alone one of its famous lobster shacks. But more than burgers on the grill, BLTs, hot dogs, panzanella salad or corn on the cob, the lobster roll is the bite I crave above all others when the mercury starts to climb. Its preparation — at least the Maine-style roll, with its chilled morsels of lobster barely held together with mayo — is the perfect antidote to a July afternoon that clings to your skin like a sweaty car seat. Somehow just the thought of one makes me think of beaches, the squawk of gulls overhead and the gentle break of the ocean at my feet.
The first lobster rolls I ate this summer were in the safety of my car. The pair that I ordered from the Dupont location (1303 19th St. NW; 202-733-1450) of Mason’s Famous Lobster Rolls, a small but growing chain, arrived in their own branded paper coffins. One was drizzled with warm butter, Connecticut-style, and the other was a “classic” chilled roll with a binder of mayonnaise and a little lemon butter. Both were history in a matter of seconds. At least the parts that didn’t topple out of the bun and disappear into the crevices of my car seat. At $15 a sandwich, it’s hard to sacrifice even a single swallow of claw meat to the carpet demons of my Mini.
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My rolls from the Dupont location of Hank’s Oyster Bar (1624 Q St. NW; 202-462-4265) also came stuffed in a paper box, but they were accompanied by a squiggly pile of skin-on Old Bay fries and a container of ketchup. The split bun could not begin to contain the swell of lobster. I was forced to pinch shreds of mayo-slathered meat between my fingers and stuff them in my mouth to avoid further spillage, lest my car become its own mobile lobster shack. I ate my roll while staring out the windshield, watching the foot traffic on Q Street and the vehicle parked directly in front of me. I ached for a view of the water.
Share this articleShareAt the outdoor bar at Ampersea (1417 Thames St.; 443-681-5310) in Baltimore, I finally had my lobster roll and my view, as the Patapsco River flowed quietly along the horizon, lapping against a dilapidated dock, its planks overgrown with weeds and small trees. A guitarist was singing “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” on a corner of the patio. (“Brandy used to watch his eyes/When he told his sailor stories/She could feel the ocean fall and rise/She saw its ragin’ glory.”) It would all be lovely by half if I weren’t watching a weather-beaten biker couple, both without masks or seemingly any fear, lean into the bar and have a prolonged conversation with the bartender about the drink options, as if this were pre-times. The bartender and I exchanged knowing looks when they left.
One of the finest moments in “The Shawshank Redemption” — and by extension the Stephen King novella from which the movie was adapted — is also one of its quietest. Andy Dufresne and his best friend, Ellis “Red” Redding, are sitting against an old stone wall in the prison yard. Andy tells Red that, if he ever leaves Shawshank, he’ll make his way down to Zihuatanejo, a quiet stretch of sand next to the Pacific Ocean.
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“You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific?” Andy says, staring into the distance, almost whispering the words like an incantation. “They say it has no memory. That’s where I want to live the rest of my life. A warm place with no memory.”
To a man like Andy, the thought of a warm spot without memory is thick with pathos and possibility. A place that won’t know his scars and his past, a place that won’t forever brand him a killer, even a wrongly convicted one. But as I hesitantly make my way back into restaurants, whether in Baltimore or Alexandria, I’m encountering another kind of Andy Dufresne: People who seem to willfully bury memories, particularly those of the past four months as a pandemic rips apart families and our way of life. These people move through the world as if there were no recent past to guide them.
As much as I empathize with Andy, the character, he had it wrong. The ocean does have memory. Scientists have discovered that the Little Ice Age has yet to impact the deepest parts of the Pacific, where the waters still reflect temperatures of the 16th century, or earlier. This knowledge gives me strange comfort. It’s as if I, like the ocean, can enjoy the warmth of an earlier time, while still aware of the bite that hovers over my head. The metaphor of ocean memory can apply even to the Andys who live only for the present. Time, the ocean seems to tell us, will eventually catch up with those who are blissfully unaware of the chill to come.
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