Eating the Caribbean’s Rarest Lobster

Above: a slipper lobster at Grand Case’s Le Pressoir (All photos by CJ)

By Alexander Britell and Guy Britton

ST MARTIN— Sleeper lobster. It’s called that because it sleeps so far below the surface. Or so we thought.

The waiter presented a lobster unlike any we had seen — a long, dark-brown, prehistoric-looking creature who dwelled 2,000 feet below the surface.

After a little tableside research, it turned out it was called a slipper lobster, named not for its bedtime but for its shape — that of a long, flat slipper.

Here at Le Pressoir, one of the best restaurants on Grand Case, one of the Caribbean’s great food streets, this was, too, a rarity.

Above: Chef Franck Mear

The Chef, Franck Mear, explained that this lobster came in about six times a year.

It comes in without notice, served only by the luck of the waves.

It really is a curious-looking thing, something out of a different time with ancient DNA.

Then the waiter brought it out, quiet and calm, perhaps sleeping as its onetime named had inferred.

And then, after some foie gras and escargot, we tried it.

It was perhaps the best lobster in the Caribbean. And definitely rarest.

It was a different kind of tender, a different sort of sweet. No, it didn’t look quite like lobster, and didn’t taste quite like it. It tasted better.

It is very good. It is very rare.