Neoclassic Seafood Salad

In late-1980s New York City, Gotham Bar and Grill was the hottest ticket in town, and if you wanted to get your kitchen bona fides there, you had to be able to stack a seafood salad. We’re not talking about a mound of over-marinated mussels and clams atop a couple of iceberg leaves. Chef Alfred Portale grew up in Buffalo, where he dreamed of becoming a jewelry designer until the kitchens of France came calling. A year and a half after Gotham opened in 1984, the in-demand young chef was brought in to overhaul the lackluster opening menu. He found himself fixating on frutti di mare, the seafood salads in deli cases in Little Italy, and was inspired by the ingredients, if not the execution. He wondered what might happen if he cast a more discerning net with his sourcing, maybe some octopus from his purveyor in Japan, ruby prawns from Maine, some fresh lobster, calamari, scallops — each poached separately, then assembled into something that amounted to more than the sum of its parts.

Portale’s seafood salad became as iconic as Gotham itself during the late ’80s and early ’90s. It also made a splash on the printed page in June of 1993, when the recipe ran in Food & Wine in a feature along-side other distinctive salads of the time. Here’s how the legendarily caustic restaurant critic Seymour Britchky described Portale’s seafood salad in 1991: “Visually prepossessing, it reaches you as a tall cone, partially wrapped in the thin, splayed slices of a ripe avocado, spiky greens sprouting gaily from its apex, glistening of silken olive oil. There are tiny sweet mussels, chunks of juicy Japanese octopus, rich scallops, morsels of lobster, more, all roused by the lemon in their dressing, and by the herbs with which they are mingled.” Seeing as Britchky was the sort of writer who once decreed that the appropriate pairing for another restaurant’s food was Alka-Seltzer, this was like a triumphant bellow from atop the Empire State Building.

A few decades later, Portale, now executive chef and owner of his namesake restaurant Portale, also in New York City, remains amused by the hype. “What I was doing a lot back then was deceptively simple,” he says. “I would take really high-quality ingredients, good execution, but dress the dish up with an elaborate presentation. A lot of that came with stacking the food, and then later it became architectural cuisine.” If a cook trailing in Portale’s kitchen proved a potential fit, he’d put them on the salad station to test them on the dish. “If they could make it, they were pretty much hired for the position,” says Portale.

But once the late New York Magazine critic Gael Greene penned the line, “It’s his gorgeous skyscraper seafood salad that inspires the tall-food craze,” in 2003, Portale was ready to knock it all down. Though the salad was a signature dish for the restaurant and for the chef himself, “the presentation took on too much importance. I started getting calls — I swear it was once a week — from reporters saying, ‘I’m doing an article on tall food. I hear you’re the one who invented it.’ I simply said, ‘No comment.’”

But Portale never turned his back on his foundational dish — nor would the fans who followed the chef to Portale after his 34-year tenure at Gotham. At Portale, the simply titled Frutti di Mare is essentially a less vertical incarnation of the salad, the still-glam star who’s swapped shoulder pads for a luxurious caftan and is loving every languid minute of it. “The elements are prepared differently,” he notes, citing a lemon vinaigrette and a hint of shiso leaf, but “even though it’s relaxed, it’s still nicely plated.” Nicely? C’mon. This iconic dish remains a towering achievement by anyone’s measure. —Kat Kinsman