WHAT A HEEL: One Man’s Crayfish Is Another Man’s Lobster
NYers like to snicker that they can always pick out the tourists in a crowd because they're the ones looking up at the tops of the skyscrapers. Apparently they look down, too. At food labels.
Unbeknownst to NYers, the venerable upscale Jewish deli Zabar’s has been selling “lobster salad” for 15 years that - tasty as it was - had no lobster in it. It took Doug MacCash, a visiting reporter from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans to check the label, where in small print it says the main ingredient is “wild fresh water crayfish,” reports The New York Times:
[H]e wrote … on the newspaper’s Web site. “It was delicious, but the pink/orange tails seemed somehow familiar.”
He checked the label. “?” he wrote. “Really? At $16.95 per pound?” He photographed the label, just to be sure.
Eventually, word of the lobsterless lobster salad got around the upper West Side neighborhood where Zabar’s has been ensconced since forever: “Zabar’s Committing Lobster Salad Fraud?,” wondered West Side Rag.
For his part, Saul Zabar, the 83-year-old president and co-owner of Zabar’s, insisted that crayfish was a variety of lobster, citing Wikipedia as his authority. But Dane Somers, executive director of the Maine Lobster Council - an organization that likes to think it knows a thing or two about crustaceans – called Zabar and told him to change the name of his salad or he’d be sleeping with the lobsters that saying crayfish were in the lobster family was like saying trout and minnows were in the fish family.
The salad is now called “Seafare.”
Disclosure: The Stiletto’s family are long-time customers of Zabar’s and incorporate its baked salmon salad, whitefish salad, chopped liver and other signature treats into their holiday meals. The Stiletto highly recommends the shrimp salad, which features plenty of nice, big, firm-textured shrimp. And if you get there early enough on Friday evening, you could take home one of their pillowy challah breads.
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