Name: Labzter – Lobster Flavored Crackers
Origin: Philippines
Found at: Manila Groove, Tustin
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Why I Bought It:
Misspellings, even intentional ones, will always have a place on this column. This one seems made for the Internet age circa 1999? Doesn't it sound like something inspired by Shawn Fanning of Napster fame? But these days, in the age of Twitter, Facebook and iTunes, stuff like this sounds rather quaint…which is exactly why I bought one.
Tasting Notes:
Labzter is almost exactly like the shrimp chips I tried a few weeks ago. The consistency is similar. Light as air, the puffed-up cracker's closest American facsimile is the now rarely-seen potato crisps called Munchos. It produces a raucous crunch when bitten, which immediately subsides into a mouthful of foam.
The flavor here is less oily, a bit sweeter and a bit spicier than that last tapioca cracker snack I profiled. But would you be able to tell the difference if they simply called it shrimp chips rather than lobster chips? Nope.
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.