Now, If the Lobsters Will Just Wait to Eat

Jack Van Olst is dreaming of bionic lobsters--not crustaceans with spare parts but ones that grow fast and furious on farms. His Sorrento Valley firm, Aquatic Systems Inc., has snagged a federal grant to investigate breeding lobsters on shore for later sale.

The idea is to raise them in water warmed to 72 degrees Fahrenheit, where lobsters seem to mature to “market size” in two years rather than seven. Lobster farms could be located near power plants, where there’s a surfeit of toasty water.

“We’re developing an artificial food, a lot like a fish chow,” Van Olst said. The chow would be molded into pellets for dry storage. The lobsters won’t be the Spam of crustaceans, however. “We’ve done taste tests to show they taste exactly the same,” Van Olst said.

Restaurants and investors are interested in the idea, which Van Olst predicts could help the United States’ strained lobster fisheries. Van Olst, who used to direct the Scripps Lobster Aquaculture Program, figures the first farms are five years away. In the meantime, his firm will help fish stores “manage their losses.”

There have been farming patents out for decades, but so far no one has conquered one problem posed by lobsters’ peculiar personalities: cannibalism.

Eat, You Won’t be Mad

Ten years ago, Mark Likgalter was living in Georgia, U.S.S.R., translating art publications into foreign languages. Now he presides over a Texas barbecue shop on 5th Avenue in downtown San Diego, smoking meat and stewing sauce with 19 ingredients.

A Soviet emigre for “personal, political and economic” reasons, Likgalter moved to New York City in 1976 and got a job with a publishing house. Transferred to San Diego in 1982, he stopped off in Texas and had his first taste of the food that would reroute his life.

Two years later, he quit publishing and phoned the Dallas Chamber of Commerce. “They said the motherland for barbecue is in Mesquite,” he recalls. He served a five-month apprenticeship with the Long Horse Barbecue in Mesquite, a suburb of Dallas.

“KGB?” the owner wanted to know.

“I said of course!”

Likgalter learned how to smell the mesquite for quality, build the barbecue oven, and smoke meat. He has since incorporated the techniques of festival cooking in his native Soviet Georgia, using ingredients ranging from coriander to peppermint.

One recent afternoon, a customer turned up at Likgalter’s Fifth Avenue Barbecue with a gift for the owner--a pair of tickets for a concert that night.

“See! That’s America!” he exulted. “This is the freedom of expression! People (here) are kind, they are not mad. They are not like dogs. . . . Barbecue is a food that unites people. You cannot be mad when you eat barbecue.”

Making a Birthday Pitch

National City is looking for a few good men . . . well, a few well-heeled men . . . well, a few well-heeled people.

The announcement was made recently in a release from the city about a club it “hopes to stock with affluent philanthropists.” Membership is not cheap, the city admits, but will be well worth the $100 price.

So far, six people have signed up for the Centennial Club, whose mission is to raise seed money for the city’s upcoming centennial. National City, “South Bay’s First City,” turns 100 next year, and the event shall not go unrecorded.

There will be parades, a banquet, a ball and fairs, as well as calendars, banners and medallions picturing the founder. There will be historic-house tours and a pageant depicting the city’s growth out of a 26,000-acre ranch bought by Frank Kimball for $30,000 in 1868.

Finally, there will be a National City time capsule--in case androids in the year 3000 want to know about National City’s first century. The inventory has not been set, but it is expected to include video and oral histories and other National City-abilia.

Hey, Follow that Nose

For months they had eyed reporters suspiciously across Courtroom 25, attempting on occasion to shut them out. So when the jury in the Sagon Penn murder trial broke up after the verdict Thursday, the jurors scattered, hiding their faces and crying “No comment!”

Only juror Glen Coahran seemed to take to the chase with any levity. Making his way past reporters, he snatched a bicycle he had parked on Front Street. Then he whipped out a set of Groucho glasses with full regalia, schnoz and all, and pedaled towards Broadway.

“Here! Use these,” Coahran called to jury foreman Doug Bernd, negotiating a knot of scribblers a half-block away. The glasses sailed through the early-afternoon heat into Bernd’s mitt, and from there, onto his nose.

“Hey! All right!” the former foreman called back. Then he stalked off through the crowd to his car.