For the Love of the Game: Lobby Restaurant’s Chef Rob Nollé makes a hole-in-one with his late-night menu, ethereal aïoli and fresh seafood
To Chef Rob Nollé, 15 minutes early is on time. Good thing I’ve shown up on time (early) for our interview at Lobby, the cool cocktail bar that opened in 2018 on the southern tip of the high-rise hotel area.
— By Amie Watson
— Photography: Kenneth Theysen
Rob Nollé
Chef de Cuisine – Lobby Restaurant & Bar
I love it mostly because it’s one of the only places on the island with a drink that uses yellow chartreuse (a bittersweet herbal liqueur made by French monks), but also because of its central bar surrounded by booths and long tables, its patio and its VIP area upstairs. Nollé has been here from the start, five years after joining the Screaming Eagle team where friend and owner Erwin Hüsken invited him to work. “The weather’s nice!” was Hüsken’s selling point when he called Nollé in Holland. But the ginger-haired expat doesn’t like beaches – he burns easily, he says – so it must have been a cold day on the other side of the Atlantic when he said yes. More amazingly, he stuck around, a big reason for which is the golf – something you don’t hear everyday on an island known for its constant wind.
It all started when he made friends at bars where he’d go to watch American football. “I was picking on them saying golf is not a real sport and the golf pro said he’d had it with my big mouth and I should come over and see what it’s like. I hit a couple of balls and I was hooked,” he says. Now he wants to play every day. “It’s the perfect way to start an off-day.”
As fun as Nollé now finds hitting a driver into the breeze – and he does – he’s also into the social side. “Sometimes my golf friends say they wish I had an off button because I talk 75 minutes an hour,” he says. But when his friends and the tourists he meets at the golf club bar come try his restaurant, it’s Nollé’s food that does the talking.
Dinner starts with warm rolls served with his ethereally light-as-air aïoli – the perfect balance of fresh garlic and lemon. Then come sharable plates of juicy sous-vide Chinese five-piece pork belly lacquered in an addictive sauce of cloves, cinnamon, balsamic vinegar, ginger and star anise; European sea bass ceviche with diced pumpkin and a sweet ginger marinade; and meltingly tender blackened tuna, sliced rare and topped with matching dabs of home-made wasabi mayonnaise and avocado cream and served with crispy, partially translucent fried rice crisps.
Sitting on the restaurant’s patio downing a pitcher of Coca-Cola pre-shift, the aïoli genius talked seafood platters, why he doesn’t serve grouper and where he eats on his day off.
Not a lot of places on Aruba do seafood platters. What’s on yours?
The smaller one has oysters from Normandy, poached jumbo shrimp, tuna sashimi and poached Caribbean lobster – when you boil Caribbean lobster, it gets tough quickly. The big one is all that plus king crab legs and salmon and sea bass sashimi. If you’re two people, that’s a meal by itself. If you’re lucky, you have room for dessert.
Why do you use European sea bass for your ceviche instead of grouper or other local fish?
You won’t see grouper on my menu, because what most restaurants sell as grouper is pangasius, which is also called swai fillet. I love the locally caught fish, but there’s no reliable and sustainable supply. For a restaurant of our size, I can’t rely on situational things like that. Sea bass has a nice texture and comes from the Mediterranean. The flavor shows.
What do you love about Aruba?
Through my profession and my love for sports and beer, I’ve met a ton of amazing people, some of whom have become close friends.
What’s your golf handicap?
11.3. That’s okay on Aruba.
You have sushi, steak tartare, tuna tartare and some of your regular menu appetizers on your late-night menu, but do you serve that menu everyday?
Yes. We serve the late-night menu until midnight Sunday through Thursday and until 1 a.m. Friday and Saturday. The food’s easy to share while having a drink at the bar.
How is your tuna so tender?
I always use tuna freshly flown in from Suriname. It’s a natural, non-chemically treated tuna. I have good relationships with suppliers. I’m not the easiest person to work with, but they know I’m loyal. So if you eat tuna here, you know it’s high-quality.
How do you make your Peking-style duck?
I take off the skin and do the duck leg confit, in duck fat. Then I take the meat off the bone and I roll three thin crepes – not pancakes – around the meat and fresh cucumber and drizzle it with home-made hoisin sauce. Then I crisp the skin and put it on top. That and the five-spice pork belly I can never take off the menu.
Any good stories from your first year?
It was our first high season, around Christmas, and my kitchen guys and I felt confident, but it was our first time doing 200-plus covers a night. I remember when we finished, I lay down in the office and one of the wait staff came up and gave me a beer and said, “Chef, what happened to you?” “Me, I just died.”
Lobby hosts monthly gin and jazz nights, but what do you listen to in the kitchen before service?
If you come in the afternoon, you can enjoy the soothing sounds of Metallica and the likes. We are all very good singers, we think so ourselves, so you get a private concert from the chef while it lasts – the restaurant has a better sound system, so it blows us out of the water.
Where do you like to eat out on Aruba?
On my off-days, I like to go out. Some ham and prosciutto, burrata, nice pasta and a bottle of wine at Hostaria da’ Vittorio on a Sunday, that’s ideal. And I love some good steak at BLT Steak at The Ritz-Carlton. They use the same meat as I do and it’s cooked in a proper way. I’d rather pay a couple bucks extra for something good.
Lobby
Restaurant &
Bar
The VillageJuan E. Irausquin Blvd. 348A
Palm Beach
(297) 280-5330
