There is a particular sound a good lobster roll makes when you pick it up. Yuling reckons it is the butter. Nathan reckons it is the bun. Either way, Sea Salt has been quietly running one of the best five minutes of eating in the precinct, and we finally cornered the pair of them at the pass to ask how it started.

The short version involves a road trip, a chowder shack somewhere very cold, and two people who could not stop talking about it the whole flight home. The long version involves several years of arguing about mayonnaise. What survived both is the thing they serve now: Maine style, cold, dressed lightly, piled into a split roll that gets toasted in butter to order and handed over while it is still warm enough to matter.

Everything inside four metres of steel

Their kitchen is a shipping container, which sounds romantic right up until you try to fit a lobster program into one. Everything had to earn its place. The cold line runs along one wall, the toaster and the pass along the other, and there is exactly enough room for two people to get past each other if one of them turns sideways. On a Saturday night they will tell you it is the best kitchen they have ever worked in. On a still February afternoon, they are a little less romantic about it.

What to order first

Start with the OG Lobster Roll. It is the reason people queue, and ordering anything else ahead of it is a rookie error you only make once. If you are sharing, add the fries. If you are properly hungry, come back for a second roll rather than asking one to do the work of two. Nobody has ever regretted the second roll.

Sea Salt trades most nights we are open, and the queue is at its friendliest early. Trading days, the rest of the menu and directions to their door all live on the Sea Salt vendor page. Say hello to Yuling on the way past. She will pretend she is not pleased you came back.