Stuart's Fresh Seafood Market

Lobster Lady of Amagansett
by Erica Marcus

You Want A Lobster? Charlotte Klein Sasso has lobsters. Ten thousand pounds of lobsters, give or take. Most of them are crawling around the five custom-built tanks in the back recesses of Stuart's Seafood Market, the business Klein Sasso owns with her husband, Bruce Sasso. But about 500 of them are lounging in a tank in the front of the store.

It's a co-ed group, and Klein Sasso explained how to tell the males from the females. "Lobsters are shaped like humans," she said, grasping a flailing chix (chix are lobsters weighing between 1 and 11/8 pounds) and lifting it out of the tank. "The females have wider tails. The males' tails taper and one of their claws, the crusher, is usually larger than the pincer." The crusher is the claw that lobsters use to crush their dinner-which is frequently another hard-shelled lobster. Such intra-crustacean conflicts can result in loss-of-claw although in time, a lost claw will regenerate.

Lobster who are short a claw, or whose new claw hasn't reached full size are called culls. Further on down the helpless scale are the lobsters call pistols or bullets. "These guys are two-time losers," said Klein Sasso of the motionless specimens with no claws at all.

Stuart's traffics in as many local lobsters as anyone on the East End, but the Amagansett store also brings in Canadian lobsters, which tend to grow bigger. A lobster's provenance is as important as its size, according to Bruce Sasso.

"Rough, dangerour water yields a better quality lobster," he said. Apparently, the tougher a lobster's life, the harder its shell, and the harder the shell, the more meat inside.

While Klein Sasso handles Stuart's retail business-besides lobsters, the store sells a wide variety of local, domestic and imported fresh fish, prepared foods, porduce and gourmet provisions-her husband heads the back of the house, hacking up fish into salable pieces, wholesaling fish and shellfish to restaurants and other stores and running the pack house.

It's as a pack house that Stuart's got its start. Back in the '50s, Stuart Vorpahl established a clearinghouse where local fisherman could bring their catch, pack it with ice into cartons and have it shipped off to market.

Stuart's would charge a fee for each box packed. "When local people would see these beautiful fish leaving on a truck," said Klein Sasso, "they wanted to buy some. That's how Stuart's retail business started." Born in New Jersey, Klein Sasso summered out East as a child. During college she got a summer job at Gosman's Dock in Montauk. "I was studying political science at N.Y.U.," she said, "but I found I liked the seafood business better than politics. It's cleaner." After college Klein Sasso stayed at Gosman's eventually managing the seafood-wholsaling business. The couple married in 1993 and bought Stuart's three years ago. They are the store's fourth owners.

Klein Sasso treasures two sets of relationships she has established at Stuart's. First, there's the back-and-forth with the local baymen who bring their fish to Stuart's for packing. "We literally pack a ton of fish a day," she said. "And the guys who bring it inwill say, "I have these nice porgies or weakfish." And I get first pick for our shop." Then the customer evince the slightest confusion over how to prepare a given fish, she'll bound out to the counter to offer cooking advice. "A lot of times I tell customers what we're cooking for dinner that night," she said. Or she'll sell them something requires only the addition of heat, such as this packed-in-a-kettle-read-to-cook clambake.

Stove-Top Clambake 4 (1-pound) lobsters 2 pounds steamers or littleneck clams 2 pounds mussels, cleaned 12 to 16 red new potatoes 3 ears of corn, husked, silk removed 1. In a large kettle, layer, in this order, the lobsters, clams, mussels, potatoes and corm. 2. Pour 5 or so inches of water into the kettle; the lobsters needn't be submerged. Cover kettle, place over high heat and cook for 30 to 35 minutes, until potatoes are tender when poked. Makes 4 servings.