Fresh Takes on Potato Salad

06.12.2024 - 13:23 / nytimes.com

For Haitian Americans like the chef Gregory Gourdet, 49, potato salad bears little resemblance to the deli counter mainstay. Growing up in Queens, he instead ate salade russe, a traditional Haitian recipe in which potatoes are combined with peas, onions and beets, which turn the dish bubble gum pink. Today, Gourdet serves his own take on that dish as part of the summer menu at his restaurant Kann in Portland, Ore., smoking the beets and binding the ingredients with creamy rémoulade. It’s just one of a number of variations on Russian potato salad, known as Olivier — which was created in 19th-century Moscow and now shows up everywhere from Sweden to Korea — currently appearing on restaurant menus. At Eel Bar on New York’s Lower East Side, the chef-partner Aaron Crowder, 39, makes what he describes as a “New York version of the Spanish version of Russian potato salad,” informed by the ensaladilla rusa served at tapas bars that often includes green olives and roasted red peppers. He tops his with orange trout roe. Tyler Akin, 41, the chef and a partner at the Mediterranean restaurant Bastia in Philadelphia, makes potato confit in chicken fat and then mixes it with saffron-spiked aioli and shavings of Sardinian bottarga. Potato salad, he says, “just so clearly wants to be served warm and soft,” like the bacon-flecked, mayo-free German-style version that his family favors.

At the Los Angeles sake bar Ototo, the chef-owner Charles Namba, 41, drew on childhood memories of lunchtime bento boxes to create his take, which is served with a soft-cooked egg and the mini-hot dogs known as arabiki. The add-ins change occasionally but, he says, there’s always “a lot of Kewpie mayo.” And although the potato salad at Penny in New York’s East Village looks Spanish, dusted with pimentón and topped with octopus, Joshua Pinsky, 39, the chef-owner, was also inspired by the versions he tried in Japan that included everything from corn to cheese. While Pinsky, who adds smoked, pickled daikon and scallions to his mix, didn’t grow up eating potato salad, he says its throwback comfort-food appeal gives him “some nostalgia I believe I’m supposed to have.” —

Trancoso — once a fishing village and hippie hangout in the Brazilian state of Bahia — now draws celebrities and other travelers looking for quiet beaches and laid-back yet luxurious places to stay. Perhaps the best known of these is Uxua Casa Hotel & Spa, co-owned by Wilbert Das. During the pandemic, Das and his partners purchased a 15-acre stretch of rainforest along Itapororoca Beach — an isolated strip of coastline about three miles up the road from the hotel — and transformed it into Uxua Maré, a collection of 10 vacation rentals. In an effort to preserve the area, which