25When it comes
to making
a great salad,
knowing
which levers
to suppress
is as important
as knowing
which ones
to pull.Green Salad With Dill Vinaigrette
Time: 15 minutes, plus 30 minutes for chilling1 large garlic clove, fi nely grated
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
1 romaine heart
2 packed cups arugula
2 packed cups fresh parsley leaves with
tender stems
2 tablespoons fi nely chopped fresh dill
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon fi sh sauce, Worcestershire
sauce or soy sauce
Pinch of granulated sugar
Salt and black pepper- In a small bowl or measuring cup, combine
the garlic and rice vinegar, and set aside to
mellow out. - Meanwhile, trim the root end off the
romaine heart and chop lettuce crosswise into
bite-size pieces. Add the romaine, arugula
and parsley to a large bowl or salad spinner.
Fill with cold water, swish the greens, then
lift the spinner basket (or lift the greens out
and transfer to a colander in the sink) and
drain the water. Repeat 2-3 more times, or
until the water runs clear and no grit remains.
Spin-dry the greens or dry them very well
by laying them out on a large kitchen towel,
folding the towel in half and gently patting
down to remove moisture. Rinse and dry
the large bowl, and return the greens to the
bowl, cover with the damp kitchen towel and
refrigerate until cold, at least 30 minutes.
(Greens washed, dried and covered this way
can be refrigerated for up to 24 hours.) - When you’re ready to serve, finish the
vinaigrette: To the garlic and vinegar, add the
dill, olive oil, fish sauce, sugar and 1 tablespoon
cold water, and season generously with
salt and pepper. Whisk until well combined. - Add a couple of tablespoons of the vinaigrette
to the salad greens, and toss, adding more
as needed to evenly coat. The salad should be
lightly dressed, not drowned. Taste for
seasoning, adjusting with more salt and
pepper as desired.
Yield: 4 servings.me for miles along the St. Helena High-
way after I left the restaurant. I didn’t know
lettuce could taste like that, so crisp, juicy
and full of natural sweetness. That was the
day I learned that a green salad’s power
can come from its simplicity.
Keep in mind that simple does not
mean eff ortless. When it comes to mak-
ing a great salad, knowing which levers
to suppress is as important as knowing
which ones to pull. Though a restaurant
green salad can often be a throwaway dish,
it can also be a crunchy, nuanced dream —
a paradigm of balanced fl avor.
Sohui Kim, a chef and partner at the
steakhouse Gage & Tollner in Brooklyn,
views the green salad not as a compul-
sory menu item but as an opportunity to
perfect a classic, something she learned
how to do on the job at Blue Hill restau-
rant and later at Annisa (now closed),
both in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.
It’s also a barometer for how good a
restaurant is. ‘‘If you can make the sim-
plest things shine, then that bodes well
for everything else you’re about to have
at that place,’’ she says.
The salad leaves used at Gage & Tollner
come from local farms and change every
week. Sometimes it’s beautiful radicchio,
other times it’s frisée; mustard greens are
often featured. ‘‘Each leaf has its own integ-
rity and fl avor and composition,’’ Kim says,
which is why when you’re making a salad,
you should taste the leaves as you go. Such
careful consideration is essential to fi nding
the right dressing; at Gage & Tollner, that’s
an aged sherry vinegar with a smattering
of shallots that gives the mixed greens, in
Kim’s words, ‘‘that je ne sais quoi.’’
At Wm. Mulherin’s Sons in Philadel-
phia, the culinary director Jim Burke
leans into a kaleidoscopic mix of lettuces.
‘‘There are so many diff erent varieties, and
they have such diff erent characteristics,
each one of them,’’ he says. ‘‘So by mixing
and matching, you can really curate the
kind of fl avor and texture profi les you’re
looking for.’’ And to dress? Lemon, roasted
garlic, olive oil and salt. No pepper. ‘‘Pep-
per I don’t use freely,’’ he says. ‘‘I think a lot
of restaurants do that, where you have salt
and previously ground pepper right next
to each other all the time. But pepper is an
extraordinarily assertive fl avor. It doesn’t
have a place in everything, especially with
delicate leaves.’’
The variety of textures and fl avors in
Burke’s green salad is a delight, but even
more delicious is how cold the vegeta-
bles are when they land on your plate.
That’s because after washing the greens,
he chills them in wide containers in the
refrigerator, so they’re not piled on top of
one another and can dry eff ectively. This
may be the best trick in Burke’s green-sal-
ad playbook, a quiet but powerful extra
step to elevate your salads at home: After
washing and drying your greens, pop
them in the refrigerator, covered with
a tea towel, and keep them chilled until
right before you’re ready to dress them.
While the washed lettuce hangs out in the
fridge, you can continue preparing the
rest of dinner. By the time everything has
cooked, your salad leaves will be crisper
than crisp and cooler than cool, a pleasur-
able cacophony of textures, shyly slicked
with a fi lm of salt, acid and oil.
The keyword here is slicked, not
drowned. One of the most common errors
home cooks make with salad is overdress-
ing it, says Andrew Taylor, a chef and
owner of Eventide Oyster Co. in Portland,
Maine. Spicy greens, in particular, can be
delicate. ‘‘If you overdo it, you’ll just fi nd
yourself with a sodden mass of greens,’’
he says. He has also noticed that a lot of
home cooks are afraid of oil and don’t use
enough of it — and worse, use too much
vinegar, which causes the fl avor to be over-
ly harsh, plus the acid quickly deteriorates
the greens. He recommends a classic ratio
for vinaigrettes: one part vinegar (or citrus
juice) to three parts oil. At Eventide, the
green salad is dressed in a light nori vin-
aigrette, echoing the sea with each saline
bite. The salad is bejeweled with pickled
vegetables, which are reminiscent of the
sweet radishes that come with Korean fried
chicken. I’d never had a green salad that
tasted so much like home.
Taylor used to think of the green salad
as a dull, obligatory dish. But years ago,
after cooking at the now-closed Boston
restaurant Clio, he saw how the gar-
de-manger chef laboriously processed
the many vegetables required for the
green salad — ‘‘17 or so,’’ he guessed. ‘‘You
had to really layer the salad very careful-
ly and build it beautifully,’’ he says. This
approach, giving a humble green salad
the care and attention that any dish on the
menu should have, resonated with him.
The salad he serves now at Eventide is
in many ways a homage to the one from
Clio, which had a soy vinaigrette and let
the vegetables speak for themselves.Unless you know your salad chef direct-
ly, or make salads yourself — a skill worth
mastering — it can be hard to know what
you’re going to get. Green salad is the Rus-
sian roulette of restaurant orders, a game
I play often. I especially love ordering it
when the menu says just ‘‘green salad’’
and nothing else. More often than not,
I’m rewarded for my blind faith: lush let-
tuce, delicate dressing, transformational
in every way.