Worst Salads

What Are Your Salad Pet Peeves?

March 12, 2013

A salad is one of the most difficult dishes to perfect. As someone who orders one for lunch daily, I'd argue there are only a few places in town where I can order a salad that's inspired yet affordable, nutritious yet filling, and easy to eat yet properly dressed.

I've come to expect today's gourmet salads to fall short of their double-digit price tags: at a new restaurant last week, I ordered a radicchio, endive, green bean, and roasted carrot salad that was 97 percent bitter greens, two percent green beans, and one percent carrot. A few days later, I dropped by Yigit Pura's Tout Sweet, where I had to reconcile a beautiful beet, orange, candied walnut, and grapefruit salad with the six-inch-long field greens that accompanied it.

Too many chickpeas. Tired, ubiquitous "field greens." Not enough chicken. My list of salad pet peeves could go on and on. What are yours?

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Salads

10 Comments

jadenirvana 9 weeks 3 days

Agree with everyone who said stingy salads-90% lettuce is not cool. Also, iceberg lettuce is not allowed in my home.

HappyKate 9 weeks 3 days

I worked a dinner once whose 'garden salad' was one handful of iceberg lettuce, 2 slices of cucumber, 2 slices of carrot, and 1 and only 1 slice of tomato. If we added more we got yelled at.

kittykat83 9 weeks 3 days

I really don't like cold chicken on my salad. And I agree about raspberry vin- I don't like super sweet dressings.

bluebellknoll 9 weeks 3 days

I hate grated cheese on salad... particularly cheddar. yuck

Miranda Jones 9 weeks 3 days

Raspberry vinaigrette! It's the worst thing ever and it just won't die. Ratio is one of the places that salad always seem to fall short for me. A salad should be easy to eat, not a negotiation, you know?

Nicole Perry 9 weeks 3 days

Susannah, I'll definitely second the undressed salad pet peeve, I get why you might want to have the dressing on the side (to make sure that you dress it to your taste level) but drizzling with dressing isn't the same as tossing, and if I'm eating the salad at a restaurant or my desk, I don't have access to a large bowl to properly toss it in. In a similar vein, I often find salad to be over or under dressed. UGH.

Nancy Einhart 9 weeks 3 days

It bothers me when people clearly don't care about their salads, which salads can be so interesting and creative. As Susannah notes, most places serve the same tired concepts: goat cheese/apples/walnuts, greek salad, asian chicken. And then the ratios are all off: a bowl full of lettuce should not cost $8. Also, I hate having to eat salad with a plastic fork.

Susannah Chen 9 weeks 3 days

Britt -- ha! It also drives me crazy . . .

When salads have 3 bites of protein (chicken, beef, shrimp, etc.) Come on -- I paid an extra $2.50 for this!
When restaurants make "salads" that aren't really salads (fried oysters with 3 leaves = not a salad).
When the salad is to go with a side of dressing, and it's packed so tightly that there's no room to mix the dressing into the salad.
A salad with any of the following things circa 2000: strawberries and goat cheese, Asian chicken, or field greens with raspberry vinaigrette.

My name is Susannah, and I have salad issues.