Seared Ahi Tuna Salad

A few weeks back I visited Ulele - one of my favorite restaurants in Tampa and ordered my favorite meal of Tocobaga Tuna (A Seared Ahi Tuna salad). To my surprise the chunks of tuna were much larger and no longer laid over bed of lettuce. I asked our waiter when they returned and sure enough they confirmed a slight change to some menu items - this salad included. As I finished my meal I felt like it wasn't as good as the previous iteration and was a bit sad to lose a favorite dish.

So I naturally had to find every photo I took over the last 10 years of this same salad to make sure I wasn't crazy.

Sure enough I could prove that there were less chunks of tuna this time compared to the more narrow and thinner pieces laid over the salad. You can even tell the salad dressing was possibly drizzled over the tuna as it rested.

Sometimes the roasted red peppers, tomatoes and onions were more prominent in the display as you can see from the older iterations of the dish. Its also pretty interesting to see the different levels of searing you get when you collect all these identical meals over time. I'm a fan of sushi so good sushi grade tuna I'd eat without any sear if that's how it was presented.

The sear on the most recent order isn't consistent so I'm not sure what happened there. Some of the pieces seem to have no sear - like they were sliced off prior to plating or cooked at a different angle.

Thankfully Ulele had another tuna dish (appetizer) we could try to rescue this situation of no longer enjoying the other tuna dish. For full transparency though we ordered this dish prior to the salad before knowing about this tuna incident.

This was Benne seeded seared tuna with seaweed slaw, sauce, corn salsa and some white garlic wasabi cream. Immediately I learned that when the tuna gets a chance to blend with other flavors - it elevates the dish. Each bite that I could acquire some tuna and other ingredients was a great bite. This was in contrast to my last tuna dish that had such large chunks of tuna off to the side they never had a chance to blend with anything. I guess I felt if I wanted raw pieces of tuna untouched I'd be at a sushi place.

Though I don't want this post to be an attack on Ulele since I still very much like the place, but it was time to branch out and try some tuna at other restaurants.

So next time out I went for the tuna option at the local Seasons 52 which reminded me a bit of the older design of salad at Ulele. We had tiny pieces of tuna covered in the dressing and cut small enough to be in a bite among some other flavors. This salad packed some unique flavors with mango and almonds together which was a bit different than the onion, pepper and tomato flavor that Ulele offered.

So I felt a bit validated that Ulele made a mistake - since a few large blocks of tuna on the side of the dish had no dressing, had to be cut manually and didn't seem apart of the salad. This dish seemed like all the flavors belonged together, so I had to try one more at a different restaurant to validate all these opinions.

With just my luck there was a tuna special at The Tides Market which had blackened grilled tuna with chickpeas, tomato, cucumber, peppers and a good vinaigrette. This one more resembled the recent updates at Ulele with larger chunks of tuna that were not drizzled in dressing. This meant I had to use the backside of my fork and cut these into chunks safe enough to eat. That was a bit challenging at times with the seared part of the tuna refusing to cut cleanly and requiring some effort.

Thanks to the extra vinaigrette strewn across the plate meant I could slide the cut tuna through for a bit of flavor and fork some veggies for each bite. The flavor was great, but I felt kinda that same experience of recent Ulele - it was large chunks of tuna and outside of garnish didn't really have any flavor drizzled on.

So I remembered back to the older salad at Ulele which towered the tuna in a circle in a little tower towards the middle. A tiny layer of dressing was drizzled on and the salad was excellent with probably a bit of onion, pepper or tomato in each bite. It's too bad they changed it in a way that lost my taste for it.

Thankfully tuna exists at most places to scratch this itch for a seared tuna salad.

EDIT (January 1, 2026)

After avoiding Ulele for awhile it was time to give it another shot and re-order the salad to see if anything changed. To my excitement the salad was back to the old style design with smaller tuna chunks and salad dressing drizzled over the top.

I'm happy that some change is reverted and happy for my favorite salad to be back in the form I appreciate.