EATING AROUND ESCAPE CLAWS

Problem: you love lobster, but when push comes to shove and it’s time to deal with the unpleasant, clawing reality, you tend to agree with Annie Hall’s Alvy Singer, whose last word on the subject was to the point: “We shoulda got steaks ’cause they don’t have legs.”

Solution: Robert Weinberg’s Lobsterbake Company. For $34.50 per person, Weinberg and his crew of Highland Park High School and SMU student waiters will provide-for numbers of diners ranging from two to 300-everything for a lobster-test from the one-and-three-quarter-pound crustaceans flown in from Maine to the chairs and tables to eat them on. The price includes side dishes of the highest quality: corn on the cob fresh from Farmers Market, country rolls from La Madeleine, homemade cole slaw (Weinberg’s mother’s recipe, which includes black olives and crab meat), and dense, intensely flavored chocolate truffle cake.

Weinberg, who will be a third-year law student at SMU in the fall, started the Lobsterbake Company a year ago. How does he find time to manage a thriving business and stay in law school? “That’s simple,” says the twenty-three-year-old native of Boston, “I don’t study.”

Call 890-2-LOB for information.



SIMPLE PLEASURES

With the exception of a love letter or a large check, there’s nothing I’d rather see in the mailbox than a new issue of Simple Cooking, John Thorne’s eight-page quarterly newsletter, published in January, April, July, and October. John-it’s impossible to call someone who reveals the most intimate details of his life to his readers by a last name-is a witty, profound man of forty-two who writes and produces Simple Cooking from his home base near Boston.

Some food authorities, including Richard Sax (to whom I owe my discovery of Simple Cooking), think that John is doing the best food writing in this country. I agree: like all great food writers, Thorne writes about all of the other important things in life under the guise of “just” writing about food.

Here, from a recent issue, is a sample of the sort of writing that inspires such praise: “More than men, I think, women share important memories as tokens of heir love. One recollection so given me was of a small girl watching her father making macaroni and cheese. A man for taking great pains in the perfection of small things, his method was a loving ritual of sustenance. The ingredients were prepared and mixed in a large, heat-proof mixing bowl, which was then set directly in the oven… and periodically removed during cooking for further incorporation of a precisely gauged amount of additional cheese. By the time the dish was ready, the elbow macaroni sported in it like dolphins in a savory orange-yellow sea.”

A subscription to Simple Cooking is $12 a year from Jackdaw Press, P.O. Box 371, Essex Station, Boston, Mass. 02112. John’s single-subject pamphlets are also available for $3 each, The most recent is on a topic close to home: Just Another Bowl of Texas Red.

The others are Onion Soup; Aglio, Oglio, Basilico: An Essay on the Compounding of Pesto and Diverse Other Summer Garden Meals; The English Muffin; Pizza: The Art of the Pizzaiolo; Rice and Beans: The Itinerary of a Recipe; Down East Chowder; A Pie & A Pint: A Gallimaufry of British Pub Grub; and The Dill Crock.

THIS SPUD’S FOR YOU



In our continuing quest to achieve the ultimate junk-food jones, this month we consider the potato chip. Clearing the palate with Diet Coke (in a vain attempt to make up for the 160 or so calories per ounce that chips represent), we sampled eleven readily available brands of salted, oiled spuds. To keep life simple-after all, this isn’t Consumer Reports-no crinkled, cross-hatched, or flavored chips were considered. (If you want to eat fluted jalapeno-bubblegum chips, you’re on your own.) We came up with three winners. In the thin, delicate-textured category. Delta Gold, a Frito-Lay product made in Dallas, was declared a winner. In the thicker, crunchy category, Boles Hand-Cooked Old-Fashioned, which hails from Tyler, Texas, triumphed. In a category of its own: Home Fries, an out-of-state dark horse made by Wise Foods. These guys had an earthy flavor of potato skins that held our interest.