This is Highly Recommend, a column dedicated to our very opinionated editors’ favorite things to eat, drink, and buy.
Restaurant menus can be a bit formulaic these days, with each dish described in a minimalist list of ingredients strung together with commas. Endive, pistachios, parm. Scallops, XO sauce, shiso. Kinda boring, right? So, I was delighted and maybe a little unnerved when I came across this freaky-sounding dish at Peoples Wine, the new wine bar/shop in New York City from Hot 10 alums Jeremiah Stone and Fábian von Hauske. “Lobster Mac: cold pasta salad with lobster.” What?! For a brief nightmarish moment, I imagined a Frankenstein of carbs, a gurgling casserole of lobster mac and cheese circa early 2000s and a slippery mound of mayo-lathered fusilli with mealy strands of lobster. Then I remembered this is Stone and von Hauske we’re talking about. I had to order it.
I got one thing right: There was fusilli! The lobster mac arrived cold and in an elegant glass bowl, with billowy bonito flakes and thin strips of crispy nori waving me in. They provided the right textural contrast and sharp fishiness to balance all the velvety, creamy goodness of an umeboshi- and shichimi togarashi–powered mayo coating chubby chunks of tender, meaty lobster. I’d never thought of pasta salad as being a particularly balanced dish, but this one had it all: ocean-y umami flavor, a little hit of heat, a much needed sour note, and the right amount of mayo. I had to know how they did it.
“So I was doing an event in the Hamptons with Questlove…” Stone began. Maybe Tom Cruise was there, maybe he wasn’t, don’t ask, but at that event, which was 80s-themed, he made two pasta salads: one inspired by a recent trip to Italy and the other inspired by takoyaki (doughy octopus balls topped with mayo, sweet takoyaki sauce, pickled ginger, and bonito flakes) and lobster mac and cheese. The latter one was a hit and Stone tucked the idea way until he started working on the menu for Peoples.
The resulting transcendent creation is a combination of smart little tricks: Cooking the fusilli in MSG-forward hondashi (“a naughty dashi”) to imbue it with umami. Adding l
obster coral, the salty, sweet roe, to the mayo for extra oomph. Dressing the noodles twice, first with the mayo, then with glug of olive oil and lemon juice to help loosen it up.
Sure, my imagination ran wild with the initial idea of this dish, but Stone’s ran wilder. I think we can all agree that we’re better off with his vision, and not mine.
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