Grilled Octopus with Garlic Chives and Fingerling Potato Salad

I’ve tried all the tricks that anyone has ever suggested to make octopus tender. There’s the one about cooking the tentacles with a wine cork; another insists there has to be a little vinegar in the water. Traditionally, recipes call for long periods of pounding against a hard, rough stone, as it’s done in Greece. The cork, in my experiment at least, didn’t do anything. Neither did the vinegar, except to impart a little of that flavor. And the pounding—unless I did it incorrectly—resulted i