# At Lobster Landing, a Crooked Sign Stays Crooked on Purpose
The “O” in the Lobster Landing sign has been tilted into the “L” next to it for years. Owner Enea Bacci once went to straighten it, and his wife, Cathie, stopped him — she felt the crookedness gave the place more character, and the sign has stayed that way since. It is a small detail, but it tells you something about how Lobster Landing operates: imperfections get left alone if they’re not actually broken.
The shack itself sits on pilings over an inlet of Long Island Sound at the end of a residential street in Clinton, a hundred-year-old wood-frame structure that has survived at least two hurricanes. Bacci and his wife have run it since 1995, sourcing lobster meat from a team of about eight local boats — a meaningful supply chain in an industry that has shrunk dramatically along the Connecticut shoreline, with the state’s lobster landings falling from millions of pounds in the late 1990s to a small fraction of that today. Bacci has said keeping enough boats under contract to supply the restaurant through a full season has gotten harder as the years go on, not easier.
The menu is short by design: a hot lobster roll, a cold one, and not much beyond a sausage-and-peppers sub, hot dogs, chowder, and a few sides. The hot roll is the draw — lobster meat picked fresh and warmed gently in butter rather than tossed into a hot pan, a method Bacci insists on because high heat toughens the meat. It’s served in a oversized sub roll with the center cut away to make room for as much lobster as the bread can hold. There’s also a retail side to the operation: live lobsters, oysters, clams, and mussels sold by the pound for anyone who wants to cook at home instead.
Seating is a handful of plastic tables on a deck made of broken clamshells, under a tent that does double duty as shelter from rain and sun. There’s no liquor license, so it’s BYOB, and dogs are welcome at the outdoor tables. The whole operation reads as a holdover from an earlier era of the Connecticut coast, when small shacks like this lined much of the shoreline rather than standing out as a rarity.
Lobster Landing runs roughly from mid-April through New Year’s Eve, a longer season than some of its shoreline counterparts but still bounded by the calendar — Bacci has described waiting on state approval most years before he can reopen in the spring. Customers come from well outside Clinton, often driving down from Boston or up from New York specifically for the hot roll, arriving long after the pleasure boats next door have been shrink-wrapped for the winter. The shack’s continued survival, weather and supply chains permitting, has become its own kind of local landmark.
📍 152 Commerce Street, Clinton, CT
🕐 Seasonal, mid-April–December 31; daily 11 am–6 pm (Fri–Sun to 7 pm) in season
🔗 lobsterlandingct.com