Photo by Matthias Roeckl.
Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A basement apartment. The site of hundreds of covert lobster roll hand-offs orchestrated by Dr. Klaw, the alias Chef Ben Sargent chose when he started the Underground Lobster Pound in 2010. Though shut down by authorities after two-and-a-half years of stealth deliciousness, an effort to revive the Dr. Klaw legacy is now underway via a new Kickstarter campaign.
If Sargent can raise $45,000 before the end of July, he’ll hop on his custom-made crustacean motorcycle for a cross-country adventure to find Dr. Klaw in a live-action cooking show broadcast on Periscope.
“I wanted to come up with a way that I could bring the Dr. Klaw experience back, but on the road, to reach more people in more places, let them experience the weirdness of the whole thing,” says Sargent.
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Backers of the project will have input regarding Sargent’s route and will be able to watch footage from a camera mounted on his 1984 Honda CT110, tricked out in red leather to look like a lobster. “It will literally go anywhere,” the chef says of his mode of transportation. “It has three gas tanks on it. It’s a real machine, even though it was built in the ‘80s. It doesn’t go fast, but it can climb over anything and you can fix it anywhere. It’s a very simple bike.”
As Sargent visits fellow seafood aficionados and fishermen, the elusive Dr. Klaw will chime in via an app, leading backers to exclusive cooking events comparable to raves, but for foodies.
Photo: Ben Sargent and Dr. Klaw on Facebook.
Sargent has been obsessed with seafood since his childhood in Cambridge, Mass. He was raised in a “hippie” family by a Jewish mother who cooked Italian food and a “WASPy” New England father with a love of the outdoors. It was his grandfather who taught him to fish and dig for clams, bringing Sargent on day-long excursions when he was as young as four years old.
Though he studied art in college, he soon veered into the restaurant industry. In 2001, he opened Hurricane Hopeful, a seafood venue in Williamsburg, and later went on to City Soup, where he developed chowder recipes. Then he enrolled at the French Culinary Institute–for a limited time only. As he tells it: “Our chef came in and tucked in our whites. I go, ‘Thank you.’ He looks at me very sternly and goes, ‘Thank you? Thank you, Chef.’ And I just packed my stuff and walked out. It was the best decision I’ve ever made.”
Around this time, lobster rolls experienced a surge in popularity. Sargent had been making them since he was 21 and didn’t find the new versions true to those he knew from Maine. “Not that they weren’t doing a really good job of what they were doing, it’s just that they were making that experience very fancy. Yes, it’s great to have lobster spilling out over a fancy brioche bun or baguette, but it’s no longer a lobster roll. It’s no different from messing up the perfect frank at the ballpark. You have to have the proportions right. In that first bite, it has to have that lobster-to-toasted-bun ratio.”
Photo: Ben Sargent and Dr. Klaw on Facebook.
“A lobster roll is very simple, very tasty, not high-end,” he continues. “In my opinion, you use a high-fructose corn syrup top-loader hot dog bun. There’s a reason for that: because everyone’s been doing it throughout the years and it’s just the right thing to use. Don’t mess with something that’s absolutely perfect.”
This is when Sargent became Dr. Klaw, and began selling lobster rolls out of his basement apartment in Brooklyn. The pseudonym–necessary to spread the word about the business without getting himself in hot water–was inspired by Dr. Claw, the faceless nemesis of Inspector Gadget. Ironic, then, that investigators eventually cracked the case of Dr. Klaw and, after threatening Sargent with jail time, shut down his operations.
But just because Dr. Klaw went kaput doesn’t mean Sargent went into hiding. He was soon approached by the Cooking Channel to do the seafood show Hook, Line, and Dinner. More opportunities followed, including an appearance on Chopped, a weekly radio show called Catch It, Cook It, and Eat it, and the publication of his cookbook The Catch.
Now he’s eager to reclaim the Dr. Klaw identity that started it all.
“My thing has always been telling these seafood stories,” Sargent says. “So if this is going awesome, I’ll go to the tip of Patagonia. That stuff doesn’t scare me.”
