For shame, Zabar’s! From the NYT:
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.
Although, I guess it really means that you know how great crawfish are. Hoping those are deep-south crawfish you’re using, and not that other stuff from overseas, like what I found at Whole Foods (aghast! really, I expected better at WF) a couple of years ago:
The best comeback Saul Zabar had was a Wikipedia article stating that crawfish are in the same family as lobsters. The first rule should be that no one can ever use Wikipedia of all things as a reference in an apology. But I guess crawfish are in the same family, and they do sort-of look like little lobsters. Here’s a crawfish boil Av did:
…but they sure aren’t the lobsters everyone expects. My favorite lobster roll ever was my first — from Bob’s Clam Hut in Kittery, Maine:
Well, the Maine Lobster Council got upset that Zabar’s was calling something other than lobster ‘lobster’. Rather than just calling it what it is, crawfish salad, they decided to change the name to ‘seafare salad’. Maybe it’s because I’ve caught crawfish myself, but you don’t really pull freshwater crawfish out of the sea. You pull them out of your yard. Or a creek. Or a crawfish pond (or elsewhere). But not the sea, really.