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He only sold is

Lobster Salad, but a Key Ingredient Was Missing

By JAMES BARRON

Published: August 11, 2011

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Only the name has changed. The ingredients remain the same: wild freshwater crawfish, mayonnaise, celery, salt and sugar.

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William P. O'Donnell/The New York Times

An item at Zabar's is now sold by the name “seafare salad.”

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• City Room: In Search of Lobsterless Lobster Salad and Other Urban Canards(August 12, 2011)

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Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

Zabar's has relabeled its “lobster salad” as “seafare salad.”

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West Side Rag

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For at least 15 years, Zabar’s, the Upper West Side grocery with the big crowds and even bigger prices, sold that as lobster salad — thousands and thousands of pounds of it, by itself in a plastic tub or on a bagel or a roll. Apparently no one noticed.

Then Doug MacCash, a reporter from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, stopped at Zabar’s while vacationing in Manhattan last month.

“Lobster salad on a bagel: Why not?” he wrote on Aug. 1 on the newspaper’s Web site. “It was delicious, but the pink/orange tails seemed somehow familiar.”

He checked the label. “Wild fresh water crayfish?” he wrote. “Really? At $16.95 per pound?” He photographed the label, just to be sure.

Mr. MacCash had discovered a fact of New York culinary life that New Yorkers had not: There was no lobster in the lobster salad at Zabar’s.

It took a while for the news to reach New York, but lobster lovers elsewhere were tucking in their bibs and sounding like curmudgeons. On Tuesday, eight days after Mr. MacCash’s item appeared, The Bangor Daily News in Maine — where in 2010 fishermen caught a record 93.4 million pounds of lobsters worth more than $308 million — published an editorial headlined “No Fake Lobsters Allowed.”

By Wednesday, bloggers so close to Zabar’s that they could smell the Jamaican Blue Mountain Style coffee were on the case. “Zabar’s Committing Lobster Salad Fraud?” West Side Rag, which focuses on the Upper West Side, asked.

But if others were troubled by what seemed like a case of misrepresentation, Saul Zabar, the 83-year-old president and co-owner of Zabar’s, was not.

Selling lobsterless lobster salad, he insisted, was not dishonest.

“If you go to Wikipedia,” he said, “you will find that crawfish in many parts of the country is referred to as lobster.”

He read aloud the beginning of the Wikipedia entry for crawfish: “Crayfish, crawfish, or crawdads — members of the superfamilies Astacoidea and Parastacoidea — are freshwater crustaceans resembling small lobsters, to which they are related.”

By that definition, he said, he could call a product in which the main ingredient — actually, the only seafood ingredient — was crawfish, “lobster salad.”

“But it seems that the general consensus is when you refer to lobster, you think of the Maine lobster, which is Homarus americanus,” he said. “I had a few customers who said, ‘This is delicious, but it’s not lobster salad.’ One or two, in all the years that we’re doing this, at least 15 or 20. Then I got a call from the Maine council.”

The Maine Lobster Council, to be exact. Dane Somers, its executive director, had heard about the lobster salad that lacked any lobster. Mr. Somers said The Bangor Daily News had called, asking for his reaction.

He said this kind of problem came up about a dozen times a year. “Sometimes it’s using lobster substitutes,” he said. “It might even be a different species of lobster, such as a warm-water spiny lobster. We call people up and say, ‘Gee, this just doesn’t look quite right if you realize there’s no actual lobster in the product.’ ”

After he said something like that to Mr. Zabar, Mr. Somers said, Mr. Zabar told him that New Yorkers would not understand what crawfish was, but that it was in the “lobster family.” To Mr. Somers, that was like saying trout and minnows were in the fish family.

But by then Mr. Zabar had had enough. “We really didn’t think that we were doing anything that was not completely up and up,” he said, “but there was an element that might be confusing, and with all this stuff going on, I decided now’s the time to clarify.” So he changed the name on the label from “lobster salad” to “seafare salad.”

Seafare? “We used to make a salad that we called a seafare salad” that contained surimi, Mr. Zabar said, which he described as “a Japanese version of crab meat using pollock as the base.” (Others define surimi as a crablike product manufactured from fish. Some say it is pollock that is mixed into a paste with starch and other ingredients, and cooked and shaped to look like crab meat.)

Mr. Zabar said he did not like surimi, so he had discontinued the seafare salad years ago.

He thought of it this week when he needed a name — “I couldn’t think of anything,” he said.

Sticklers could also challenge “seafare” because freshwater crawfish would presumably not be found in the sea.

But amid the contretemps about crustaceans, Mr. Zabar said, he never considered replacing the crawfish with actual lobster. “Maine lobster is much chewier,” he said. “This is a nicer texture. It has a very nice flavor. If we used Maine lobster meat, it would be much more expensive.”

Mr. MacCash, back home in New Orleans, laughed when he heard about the name change. “It tickled me to have traveled from New Orleans to New York in order to eat crawfish,” he said. “When I’m in New York, I try to get those things that we don’t readily get here. I thought I was getting myself an up-east treat, and it turned out it was a bayou staple.”

Still, he said, “It was good; I ate every bit.”

like this for 15-20 years before someone noticed it. They we eating good and didn't even know. []