BAR HARBOR – In a town where you can eat your lobsters boiled, steamed, on a roll, baked and stuffed and even fried up Chinese style, two protesters spent early Tuesday afternoon urging passers-by to just say “no” to the state’s favorite crustacean – with mixed results.

A restaurant across the street may have benefited unexpectedly from the protest, as some tourists thought that the team from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, one dressed in a plush, red lobster costume, was actually promoting its lobster specials.

“It’s a little over the top,” Jeff Brent of Concord, N.H., said. “I thought it was an advertisement for the lobster house across the street.”

Brent, vacationing with his family, said that they would eat lobster that night and that the protesters’ point might have been made more clear if the “lobster” was standing in a pot.

The “lobster house” across from the Village Green street corner staked out by PETA is the Parkside Restaurant, which does a bustling business in lobsters.

“We sell a lot of lobsters,” restaurant manager James Costello said later that afternoon. “We prepare it six or seven different ways. … Probably steamed is the most popular.”

The protesters’ presence did not put a dent in the restaurant’s business, he said.

The team said that they were pleased with the outcome of an afternoon spent waving at tourists and distributing hundreds of fliers and stickers to bemused onlookers.

“I think we’ve had a good response from people,” Karin Robertson of Virginia said as she pulled more fliers from her shoulder bag. “Most people wouldn’t consider boiling any other animal alive. … Hopefully, they’ll leave them in the ocean instead of throwing them into a pot.”

The protest effort is part of the animal rights group’s Fish Empathy Project, launched last November.

While some declined the group’s flier, emblazoned in large letters with “Being Boiled Hurts,” others seemed to take PETA’s point to heart, if not to stomach.

Will Hare, a college professor from Storrs, Conn., said that while he recently ate lobsters at a local pound, he did feel guilty about it.

“I try to pay attention to the overfishing,” he said. “We are very much aware that [the ocean] is being overfished. … I’ll read their pamphlet and see what they say. We’re on the fence [about eating lobsters].”

The protesters came to Bar Harbor from previous stops in Portsmouth, N.H., and Portland and were headed up to Canada on Wednesday. The just-concluded Maine Lobster Festival in Rockland, at which some 30,000 crustaceans were consumed, was conspicuously absent from their protesting itinerary.

“We’ve gone to the lobster festival in the past,” Robertson said. “We don’t really need to draw attention to a festival that promotes cruelty to animals.”

Hare said he was struck by the duo’s willingness to publicly protest lobster eating in a lobster-loving town.

“I think they’re rather brave to be coming to this town and doing this,” he said.