Martha Stewart’s Viral Chicken-Lobster Dinner Is an Actual French Dish

It’s chobster season!

At least, if you’re Martha Stewart. The queen of domesticity and Instagram thirst traps entranced her followers last week when she posted a frankenfood creation straight out of, well, Manhattan.

The roast poultry stuffed with lobster, bright red claws protruding out of the golden roasted wings, a lobster head and its flimsy antennae extending from where the chicken’s head once was, and a tail curling out of the tuchus captivated the internet. And for good reason. 

More than 31,000 people liked the post in which Stewart shared the “pleasure of ding [sic]” on March 19 at Maison Barnes, which is part of the newly reopened Cafe Boulud in Manhattan. 

Maison Barnes is the more exclusive elbow of the restaurant, offering intimate experiences in salon-like rooms, i.e. celebrity caverns, where billionaires can chow down on culinary monstrosities or works of genius, depending on perspective.

And for $250, you too can try executive chef Romain Paumier’s take on the classic French poularde homardine, that is, special chicken stuffed with seafood, in this case, lobster.

Maison Barnes' version serves two or three people, and the dramatic presentation only starts with the headless sasso chicken with lobster limbs. 

The dish, which takes an hour to prepare after ordering off the menu, starts with a poularde, an elite chicken that’s slaughtered after at least 120 days of pecking on a high-fat diet, as opposed to the standard American chicken typically fed, well, who knows, and slaughtered around about 50 days of life on this chobster-ridden Earth. The poularde is then roasted with the lobster head stuffed inside, infusing the poultry with a seafood flavor, Paumier told Slate. The tail is poached and glazed with butter and then the double-body dish is assembled and presented tableside for maximum amusement and Instagramability. 

But that’s not all! Once the fowl-crustacean masterpiece is shown to diners, the lobster head is removed, crushed and flambéed with Cognac to create a lobster bisque, chicken jus, and crème fraîche sauce, while the poularde is carved and plated along with spring rice.

Poularde homardine is nothing new. It’s a 19th-century French recipe that Paumier modernized for the social media era. Maison Barnes has only been open for a few weeks, so no other evidence or perspective on the dish has been posted to social yet, save for Stewart’s grand chobster debut. Reservations for Maison Barnes appear amble on Resy, so it’s only a matter of time until the masses descend on the chicken-lobster hybrid.