salad
20 May 2005A note to all current and future restaurateurs:
If you are going to offer a house salad, do it right, or don’t do it at all. A few tips:
- Red onion goes on salad, not white. People don’t eat massive chunks of underripe cheap white onion as thick as your thumb. Not on a salad, anyway.
- Tomatoes are not decorations. They should preferrably be chewable and swallowable – not yellow, rock-hard and sliced into unconsumable fours.
- A plate of iceberg is not a salad. Buy some romaine or mesclun for fuck’s sake, you’re running a restaurant here, for god’s sake.
I ate at Piranha’s for lunch today, and had a salad that committed all of these egregious errors. It was vile.
I understand that some of these ingredients are maybe pricier, or tougher to keep fresh, but no one wants to eat this crap. Don’t put a salad on your menu if you’re not prepared to make it marginally edible.
amen. Chris and I harbor fantasies about some day opening a restaurant called “Fancy Restaurant” where we will make, among other things, a self-respecting house salad. And it will be the greatest house salad that ever was! But seriously…a salad like the one you described just doesn’t make sense. It’s like that thing you are always talking about, how in business companies will forgo a technology expense in the short term and get bent over in the long term. In buying crap ingredients to save money in the short term you end up alienating a potential regular customer in the long term. And unlike technology which I am generally ambivalent towards I AM VERY PASSIONATE ABOUT FOOD!