I heard about the salad exactly how I was supposed to, on social media, from someone who'd probably been paid to post about it. Finally, we can all breathe a sigh of relief: Tinned fish has finally made its way to Sweetgreen for the first time ever, thanks to a collaboration with Fishwife, in the form of a niçoise salad.
As a 31-year-old woman who works in an office in Manhattan and watches Instagram Reels like it is my side hustle, I am close enough to the target demographic for this kind of thing. And really, as soon as I became aware of the Fishwife x Sweetgreen niçoise salad, I felt a wave of acceptance wash over me. I had to try the salad. I would try the salad. I was supposed to try the salad. And really, the least I could do was document the experience.
For the uninitiated, Fishwife is a woman-owned, upscale tinned seafood purveyor with absurdly good branding that makes up one third of the Marked-Up Pantry Staples Holy Trinity (along with Fly by Jing chili crisp and Graza olive oil, obviously). As the old adage goes: If you walk into a charmant and expensive shoppy shop and it doesn't have Fishwife on the shelves, do not spend $45 dollars there. Sweetgreen, on the other hand, is the ur-sad desk lunch, the slop bowl that launched a thousand build-it-yourself chains, and most recently, the subject of a Hell Gate blog about its robot salad-makers.
A disclaimer before I get into it: I've popped a few Fishwife tins in my day, and obviously I've had Sweetgreen before, but this particular lunch was my very first experience with a niçoise salad. I'm a niçoise naïf. So maybe take everything that follows with a grain of salt—salt that, in my opinion, the Fishwife niçoise salad could have used. But more on that later.