New York salad culture errs Sweetgreen or Caesar, either desperate or larger-than-life archetype. I like a Cobb or a wedge, but it can feel like a French-cuffs-and-gold-watch caricature of lunch. Sometimes there’s a shaved fennel and citrus thing on the menu, but never the herby, textured arrangements in the California Alice Waters sense, or, like in London, where I am now, and all my cool friends go to Rochelle Canteen and Café Deco and have something like a roasted tomato, anchovy, and little gem salad with their bread and butter and sleek filets of mullet and puddings that always sound so quaint.
A few falls ago, I was trying on a new relationship that cut too narrow in the back (I was losing my mind…), and I did something I never do, take a screenshot of the subject line of a recipe email.
“The Pleasures of Green Salad.”
I needed a very green salad with herbs and vinaigrette, the way I sometimes need a consommé, or to poach a plain chicken breast in broth, to turn things over. I almost stuck my face in the frill of a butterhead; I made a tarragon dressing instead.
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Earlier this month I was also in London, having lunch with Miriam, and ordered some innocuous-sounding green beans to have with cauliflower soup. This turned out to be my ideal Green Salad: lettuces and green beans, but so savory, studded with garlic confit and dressed with anchovy. Now it’s another standing-up-at-the-kitchen-counter with a cold chicken leg thing.
The day before I was at Café Deco and wanted something with heft, but with greens, before an afternoon of book shopping. The salad of confit pork head, radishes, cress, pickled cucumber, and croutons was herbaceous with the crunch I wanted, the pork like ultra-luxurious lardons. A pat of butter sat underneath a small bowl of boiled potatoes and melted with their heat. Then there was dessert.
At the coop I bought a bundle of deep purple, slightly oblong Italian prune plums and made David Tanis’s plum almond crumble. Everything he does is seasonal and easy, but still somewhat composed, which is how I (try to) make things regularly at home. I had crumble with vanilla gelato for breakfast.
Summer eating notes: I’ve already forgotten it. During this season in New York drinking feels like eating? There was…
Matt’s perfect niçoise, Campari spritz, and Ina Garten coconut cake lunch / blistered shishitos and corn on the cob / roasted trout with shaved fennel at Nancy’s / Superiority Burger veggie burgers / Cosmos and chocolate birthday cake (bought off-site) at a party upstairs at Sardi’s (thank you Adam) / Russian Samovar Porn Star Martinis where the waitress bullied the boys: “You’re going to make a woman pay?” / Pissaladière and mullet and Tunisian brik and pastis in Marseille
