Peggy spared the pot at shell-shocked eatery

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This article was published 17/07/2020 (2219 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When you’re the owner of a seafood restaurant in Winnipeg, it’s pretty rare to get an urgent phone call telling you to race in to work as soon as possible.

But that’s what happened July 9 to Thomas Nguyen, the 34-year-old owner of the Captain’s Boil, a Cajun-style seafood restaurant that opened in December 2018 in a former Salisbury House at 2081 Pembina Hwy.

That was the day Nguyen’s staff picked up a regular biweekly shipment of 200 lobsters from Nova Scotia at the airport, ferried it back to the restaurant, cracked it open — and discovered something none of them had ever seen.

“They were opening the box and they saw this lobster and they said: ‘Why did they ship us a cooked lobster?’ They thought it was cooked and placed there by mistake,” Nguyen recalls, sipping coffee in his sun-dappled eatery, which reopened this month with social-distancing restrictions.

“They picked it (the lobster) up and it started moving so our staff freaked out and called me and said: ‘Tom, you’ve got to come in, we found an orange lobster!’”

The restaurateur says he’s seen an ocean of lobsters — “I’ve seen thousands and thousands” — but he’d never come across anything as strange as this bright orange, 900-gram female crustacean flown in live from the East Coast.

Lobsters turn red when they’re cooked, but the vast majority of living lobsters are of the brownish-greenish-grey variety.

According to the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine, orange ones are incredibly rare — that colouring occurs in only one in 30 million lobsters. They rarely survive because their colouring is like a flashing neon sign to larger predators.

There are other rare colour variations caused by genetic mutations: blue (one in two million), red (one in 10 million), or the rarest of all, the split-coloured lobsters with two distinct colours (one in 50 million).

“None of us has ever seen anything like this. We’ve seen a red lobster when it’s cooked, but an orange lobster is unheard of,” Nguyen says. “I’d heard of blue lobsters, but I’d never heard of orange lobsters. I was shocked. It’s like you’re seeing a unicorn.”

“I’d heard of blue lobsters, but I’d never heard of orange lobsters. I was shocked. It’s like you’re seeing a unicorn.”

This writer raced over to the restaurant Thursday morning because, when you’re a humour columnist and someone stumbles on a one-in-30-million crustacean, you are professionally obligated to check it out.

Which is when Nguyen happily climbed up a step-ladder and fished the new arrival out of a 200-gallon saltwater tank, in which she lives alone to ensure the other lobsters — housed in a separate tank — don’t pick on her because she’s different.

“There she is,” he said with obvious pride. “She’s special! She’s on her own so that no one bothers her until she finds a new home. She can rest peacefully in there until she finds a new home.”

He offered to let this columnist hold the lobster, but was rejected, because you do not get to be a big-shot local personality by putting your mitts on crustaceans that have more legs than a standard softball team.

It’s something of a miracle such a bright lobster made it all the way to Winnipeg from the East Coast. “I don’t know how it went from catching to sorting to packing to ending up in Winnipeg,” Nguyen says.

While some at the restaurant were keen to eat the unusual new arrival, Nguyen is determined their star crustacean — nicknamed “Peggy” in honour of her unexpected arrival in this Prairie city — will never end up on a dinner plate with a side of melted butter.

“I want to find her a new home,” he declares. “She’s special. I like her to live a full lobster life and for other people to appreciate its uniqueness. How many people have had the chance to see a live orange lobster. It’s like a golden lobster!”

The goal is to find an aquarium eager to display such a rare crustacean, or to have a Free Press reader with deep pockets step forward and offer to ship “Peggy” back to Nova Scotia to be released into her native stomping waters, so to speak.

“I’m thinking of donating her to anyone, any organization, that can keep her, or release her back into the wild. An aquarium or someone willing to fly her back to Nova Scotia.”

(Anyone interested in paying airfare for a unique lobster is invited to email Nguyen at 2081Pembina@thecaptainsboil.com.)

“We want her to live,” the restaurateur says. “We’re feeding her shrimp and other seafood to keep her strong. She’s in good shape. Lobsters only have their claws up when they’re strong.”

“She’s special. I like her to live a full lobster life and for other people to appreciate its uniqueness. How many people have had the chance to see a live orange lobster. It’s like a golden lobster!”

Asked if “Peggy” has her own personality, Nguyen pauses briefly to think. “I won’t say personality,” he finally answers. “It’s hard to say. I will say she’s very shy, because she always curls up in the corner of her tank.”

It’s not the first time an orange lobster has surfaced — a seafood restaurant in Massachusetts saved one last month after it arrived in a wholesale delivery. It plans to donate it to a local aquarium.

In 2018, an orange lobster was spared becoming dinner and donated to the New England Aquarium after it was discovered at a local grocery store.

Even though “Peggy” is a one-in-30 million find, Nguyen is determined to bid farewell to his lobster — because he refuses to be shellfish.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca