Lobster Club

A California hand in a Japanese brasserie

In a room built for appetite, Lobster Club folds lobster into dumplings, sets it against wasabi, and sends it through a modern Japanese brasserie inside the Seagram Building. Tasuku Murakami is executive chef, and he arrives with pedigree from the Michelin-starred Sushi Azabu, which is what gives the house its Japanese seafood focus: fresh fish, sushi prepared with an eye to how it looks as well as how it eats, and bold seasoning where the plate can take it. The assignment is not a sushi counter pretending to be a brasserie. It is to let that training sit inside a different grammar: sushi, teppanyaki, sake, lobster, wagyu, and the social pace of a Midtown room that wants food to move easily across the table.

Lobster as the house discipline

The menu works in a la carte and family-style modes, with omakase available as part of the format, but its real structure is repetition around a single ingredient. Wasabi Lobster, Lobster Dumplings, the Lobster Club Sandwich, and the Surf and Turf Roll keep returning to lobster from different stations, some cold and precise, some cooked and richer, some folded into the shared-plate language of the room. The Wagyu Truffle Sando sits beside that work rather than outside it, a reminder that the kitchen is not a brasserie using Japanese details as trim. The beverage program follows the same spread, with sake, wine, and craft cocktails built for seafood, fat, and salt. The useful vocabulary here is restraint under pressure: let the coastal product stay legible, let the sauce or wasabi sharpen it, let the luxury arrive through proportion rather than weight.

The room under 53rd Street

The room carries its own memory before a plate lands. Lobster Club occupies the 4,500-square-foot shell at 98 East 53rd Street that once held Brasserie, the casual sibling to the dining rooms above it. The Seagram Building dates to 1958; Brasserie opened in 1959, and the lower space later passed through damage in the 1990s and renovation from 1995 to 1999 before the restaurant spaces were rebooted in 2017. Here the preservation burden is lighter than upstairs, so the room can lean into color and noise: pink and chartreuse upholstery, a white onyx bar counter, bold artwork, curated music, and the feeling of a nightclub disciplined by dinner service. It is bright, festive, and lively, but the room does not blur the work. The counter, the pass, and the table all keep returning to shellfish.

What holds

Lobster Club matters less as a novelty than as a test of translation. A sushi pedigree has to hold inside a Midtown seafood brasserie where plates move family-style and the room is loud with its own history. The house keeps its identity narrow enough to be useful: lobster first, then wagyu, sushi, sake, wine, and cocktails in support. The plate to measure it by remains Wasabi Lobster.