In Conversation With Jeff Holden, Actual Literal Founding Father Of Luke’s Lobster
Photography © David Degner
Jeff Holden has been in the lobster business for nearly half a century. He’s done everything, from heading out to sea to lay traps and fishing and selling his own catch, to picking and processing lobster meat and heading up his own global business.
More recently, he channeled his vast experience and a little bit of seed capital into a pop-up East Village lobster roll restaurant, which, at the hand of his son Luke, would grow into the one of the US’s most successful and beloved seafood restaurants. Below, he shares his story.
“I started off working on the waterfront when I was 14 to 15 years old. We used to go down there on a Saturday morning, and they'd put us down in the holds of boats that we'd eventually unload. We'd fill the baskets up with fish as they set them down and so it was a good chance to make some quick cash on a Saturday morning.
“I had a job that started at 6pm and went past midnight to two in the morning. I was on the graveyard shift. Back in those days, the boats were small and they fished almost in sight of land. There were no regulations as to how much fish you could catch because fish was plentiful and cheap. But they made a good living because they could catch huge volumes and expenses were low. And, of course, that lasted until they passed the “200-mile limit” which prevented any foreign-flagged vessel from fishing within 200 miles of the United States. When they passed that, there was a huge economic boom for people building fishing boats and making it a real big commercial type business.
“Ten years after they passed the 200-mile limit, we started seeing the results of poor fishery management and declining stocks. Most of the inshore fish, the cod, the haddock, almost completely disappeared. At that same time, a couple of important decisions were made in the lobster business: the most important being they increased the size of the lobsters. The catch then went from 20 million lbs annually to 125 million lbs annually over the next 20 years. My first job was on the back of boats as, what they call a sternman, which is the guy who opens the traps up, takes the lobsters out, rebaits the trap, and then sets them off the back of the boat as the captain finds the new place to lay the traps. That was probably in 1973, 1974. After fishing for a few years, the price of lobster back then was really low, getting paid $1.00 to $1.25 a lb for, and I started catching a fair amount of crab in the traps too, but there was no market.
“I found a small storefront up on a place called Munjoy Hill which is in Portland, and it was $50 a month rent, so I opened up the store, put a lobster tank in there and a fish counter and started catching fish and selling my lobsters through the store. I could do quite a bit better selling the lobsters through the store then I could selling them wholesale. I hired a couple of ladies to start picking crab, and that business took off, so after another year or two of fishing, I went fulltime, sold the boat, and spent the next 30 years in the processing business.
“At the time I was running the processing business, my son Luke was down in New York and he was working for a small investment banking firm. There were a bunch of things going on and one of them – this was back in 2007 – was that the economy started getting very bad. About that time, we started having a real hard time selling our processed lobster products. We were selling all of our tails, believe it or not, to the US military. All those tails were going into the Middle East for troop feeding.
“I called Luke up, because he was always interested in what was going on, and I said to him, ‘you think we could sell lobster rolls in New York City out of a pushcart or something like that, you know like they sell hot dogs out there?’ He said he didn't know, but that he’d look into it. So he went to different restaurants and he found out that he couldn't find a good lobster roll in New York City. He said they were twice as much money as they were in Maine, and the quality was terrible.
“About a week later, I get this package in the mail and I open it and it's a glossy ring binder with all these sheets inside, all the foldout schedules and all the what-ifs and this and that. Basically, he'd sent me a presentation like you’d give an investor in an investment banking situation. I thought I was going to get something on the back of a napkin, you know? Initially, per our budget, we needed to sell 50 lobster rolls a day to make money. To pay the rent, pay for health, and to make a little bit of money. So, we found that little place down in the East Village and signed the lease.
“We got the place ready to open and opened up. l was there making lobster rolls […] On the first day, I think we sold 400 to 450 lobster we were hoping to sell maybe 50.”
