After 51 years, the owner of Cape Cod’s legendary Lobster Claw started on his final workweek Sunday — which will be a full seven days like always — as he retires and puts the business up for sale.
“I’m 81 years old. ...” said Don Berig in a phone interview Sunday. “It’s been going great; I’m running out of gas.”
The summertime seafood restaurant, an Orleans landmark that opened in 1962, will close its doors next Sunday, he said.
When Berig bought the restaurant in 1970, he already knew the business side, having done the restaurant’s books for seven years while working at his father’s Beacon Hill accounting firm. But he had a special knowledge of seafood as well.
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When he was growing up Newton, Berig was nicknamed “fish boy” at his high school because he spent his after-school hours working at the family fish shop in Allston.
“I thought it was a perfect storm,” said Berig, remembering when he bought the Lobster Claw.
From then on, it was decades of working seven days a week: seven during winters at his father’s firm, seven in the summer running the Lobster Claw. (His father retired in 2000 at age 89, finally allowing his son to get a few months off.)
Not that taking time off has benefited him in the past. Last summer, Berig, an avid Patriots fan, took off a single day between June 1 and Labor Day to go to a birthday party, and it was the day star wide receiver Julian Edelman happened to stop in.
Showing up every day to work 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., cutting 100 pounds of fish each morning, Berig helped build the restaurant into an institution on Cape Cod.
When the restaurant announced its final days on Facebook, the page was flooded by well-wishers reminiscing and paying tribute to the restaurant. One remembered writing love letters to her husband on Lobster Claw postcards. Another asked if the restaurant could finally divulge its clam chowder recipe.
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“You go there and you feel a part of something,” said Kelly O’Brien Boyer, 48, of New Jersey, a lifelong visitor to “the Claw,” as they call it.
“When you think of Cape Cod, you think of a homey, friendly, warm place and environment and I think the Lobster Claw really embodied all of that,” said O’Brien Boyer, who said she cried during her last visit this summer.
“I could cry on the phone with you right now because it’s part of my childhood, and it’s letting go of that,” she said.
Lisa Ann Trudeau, 51, moved to Orleans with her husband last year and said Lobster Claw was their “go-to place,” thanks to the food and all of Berig’s stories about his family and the town.
“We will truly miss his hospitality and the restaurant as I don’t think we’ll ever find such a wonderful place to dine,” she said in a Facebook message.
“I got a million people that I know on a regular basis,” said Berig, remembering clients like author Gladys Taber who ate at the restaurant seven days a week — the only customer to ever have a reserved table.
“People have been wonderful,” he said.
The business has been for sale for several years and Berig says he is waiting for a good offer. Even with COVID-19, business has been steady, he said, although the delayed spring opening forced by the pandemic did allow him to see a Cape Cod sunset for the first time in decades. (”After seven or eight, that was enough for me,” he said.)
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“It’s been a great run,” Berig said.
But he has decided it’s time for him to retire to Florida, where he has lived in the off-season since his father closed the firm.
At 81, Berig will be retiring eight years before his late father, but he hopes he would have respected the choice.
“This is so much more physical than doing accounting,” Berig said. “... He’d maybe give me some slack.”
Lucas Phillips can be reached at lucas.phillips@globe.com.
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Cape Cod mainstay Lobster Claw to close its doors after a half century - The Boston Globe
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