Five Stellar Main-Dish Salads (That Won't Make You Wish You Ordered a Burger)
No more buckets of lettuce! These salads are wonderfully balanced and precise.
UPDATE: 4/27/2024: I just checked around. Since I wrote this piece last summer, the Peach-Burrata Salad at Lua and the Falafel Bowl at St. Kilda are no longer on the menu. But the other three main-dish salads are still available!
What makes a great main-dish salad? Let’s start with what doesn’t make a great main-dish salad.
Personally, I do not want a bucket of lettuce with a few scant items hidden in the pile. But I also don’t want a bucket of lettuce topped with an equally abundant pile of toppings. I want balance.
I want the greens to be a fresh, crisp, flavorful counterpoint to everything else, not the bulk of the dish. And if the greens have some great flavor in themselves (kale! arugula! endive! chicory! escarole! or anything locally grown!) then all the better. That’s not a deal-breaker, though, because butterhead, leaf lettuce, and a good, crisp romaine can all be great too, as long as they’re fresh and crisp and . . . not served by the bucket. Even iceberg has its place (a prope…