If you were a spiny lobster, you’d be feeling the urge to crawl far, far under a rock right now. Lobster season opened on September 1.Nestor Guillo, head chef at Lobster Pot Restaurant on Bermudiana Road, said the restaurant has been packed with patrons looking for a bite of lobster ever since.“It gets really packed when lobster season starts, especially with the first days,” said Mr Guillo. “We had almost 200 people just for dinner [last Thursday, September 1], the same on Friday and Saturday. There are a lot of people who really want to taste lobster.”Every April, the lobster season closes to commercial fishermen and recreational lobster divers. This allows the lobsters to relax and reproduce. Come September, it’s open season.The appropriate licence must be obtained from the Department of Environmental Protection. There are also strict rules about the size, and number of lobsters that can be caught and the method of catching them. For example, recreational divers can only catch two lobsters, and they must free-dive to catch them. They can not use scuba tanks.“I think the first time I cooked lobster was back in 1996, when I first came to Bermuda to work for the Port O’ Call Restaurant,” said Mr Guillo. “That was back when it was a sister restaurant to the Lobster Pot. I was really intimidated by the lobsters at first. I was told to cut them in half and parboil them.”Since then, Mr Guillo has cooked hundreds and hundreds of lobsters. He moved over to Lobster Pot when the owners sold the Port O’ Call restaurant a few years ago. He shared some tips and tricks for cooking lobsters.“When we have local lobster, the thing first we do is cut them in half,” he said. “Then we parboil them until they are half-cooked. We make some bread and seafood stuffing, that is a mixture of shrimps and crabmeat. Later on, we put them to the broil for ten to 15 minutes.”The Lobster Pot offers lobster in several ways lobster thermidor, curried lobster and lobster bisque are popular options.“There are a lot of mistakes you can make with lobster if you are not really expert at cooking it,” Mr Guillo said. “Probably, the most common mistake is overcooking them so the meat gets tough. You have to make sure that the lobster is really tender when it gets out to the customer.“When you first put the lobster in the water, the water should not be boiling hard because the meat will shrink and toughen, and then toughen even more when you put the lobsters in the oven.”He said one of the challenges of cooking Bermuda lobsters is not so much the claws, but the spines. Mr Guillo wears gloves at all times when handling lobsters.“Their spines are really sharp,” said Mr Guillo. “Every lobster season I get bruises on my fingers especially when I am cutting. In a restaurant you are not just cutting one or two lobsters but 50 or more. I have had infections in my fingers from it.”To see a video about catching lobsters in Bermuda see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjYk-lNNTOk.