SPRING has sprung, and with it the perennial battle over what makes Nicoise salad “Nicoise.”
The Riviera-born favor ite is popping up on many a spring menu, but in myriad mutant forms that have purists fuming.
Nothing drives them crazier than Nicoise made with fresh tuna. “Salade Nicoise with fresh tuna is a travesty,” my friend Mimi Sheraton, the former New York Times critic, cheerfully scolded me after I praised Nicoise made with seared tuna at Time Warner Center’s Landmarc last week.
“If you like it, you are wrong!”
Most every French-born chef agrees with her. Traditional Nicoise is built around canned tuna. It suavely marries the preserved product to string beans, olives, cooked potatoes, tomatoes and hard-boiled eggs (and, sometimes, scallions and anchovies) so its natural oily essence permeates all the elements; Le Bernardin pilot Eric Ripert calls the effect “osmosis.”
But today, most New York chefs regard anything less than “fresh” as blasphemous, and the canned classic is harder than ever to find.
Even the Upper West Side’s Nice Matin, named for the salad’s home city, uses fresh tuna. The twist is that it’s poached in olive oil – “a process to achieve the canned effect using fresh tuna,” says sous-chef Adrian Leskiw.
But, “Canned tuna always,” declares Francois Payard, owner of Payard Bistro on Lexington Avenue. Landmarc’s dish “is vegetable salad with grilled tuna,” BLT Fish chef Laurent Tourondel says. “It is not Nicoise.”
In a reversal of stereotypes, it’s non-French chefs and owners who look down their noses at old-style Nicoise.
At Swifty’s, chef/partner Stephen Attoe, says, “People today gravitate toward food that’s fresh as opposed to something out of a tin.”
Joanne Makovitzky, who owns Tocqueville with her husband, chef Marco Moreira, says of their dish, “In New York, you don’t want a canned product.
“Our tuna is lightly crusted with coriander seeds and black pepper. This is what our customers want.”
But the Nicoise debate even goes beyond the fish. Take potatoes. Payard, who was born in Nice, says they don’t belong.
“In Nice, we didn’t use potatoes. It is supposed to be a summer dish and very light.” But Tourondel harrumphed, “I’ve never found any without potatoes.”
Nor is there agreement on which canned tuna to use. Alex Hary, head captain at Le Perigord on East 52nd Street, says the best is Olimar, an Ecuadorean brand using ultra-oily belly tuna; the only problem is it’s impossible to find.
At BLT Fish, Tourondel uses Italian Albacore. Mine arrived soft and shredded, allowing its oil to seep and merge into the other elements – the closest to the classic ideal I found in a week of Nicoise-wrangling.
But it was another story at Brasserie Rulhmann, where Tourondel is also executive chef. The tuna in my Nicoise was in hard, dry chunks more suited to a rock garden. “I’m surprised you’re telling me that,” Tourondel said.
Chat Noir, a very French bistro on East 66th Street, is the only place I found that offers Nicoise salad both ways – using canned tuna at lunch and seared fresh tuna at dinner.
Owner Suzanne Latapie says, “It’s a girl thing in the afternoon.” But Chat Noir’s is a stylized take on a traditionally uncomposed dish; the tuna, a blend of Italian white and dark lightly bound by light mayonaise, is formed into a luscious square placed atop layers of potatoes, olives and haricot verts.
If that isn’t confusing enough, Latapie says she found a recipe in the 1903 “Escoffier Guide Culinarie” using tomatoes, potatoes and haricot verts – but no tuna.
“Nicoise without tuna?” Tourondel laughed.
But just think: no canned, no fresh – no arguments.