Dancing Salad With the Stars

Every blue moon, a true honest-to-god celeb walks into our soul food kitchen. Not naming any names, mind you. This particularly person, vegan, was on a particularly strict regimen: No salt or pepper, none of the spicier things such as onions, scallions, chives, garlic, no oil, nothing much cooked. In short, all the things I love to do were verboten.

I loved the challenge.

I’ve done this salad for our celeb twice — first time was apparently better — using whatever we had on hand in the walk-ins. Our guest loved it enough to ask that we put it on the menu. But you have to know the backstory to order it, saying something like “I want THAT salad, if you know what I mean.” It’s all very hush-hush and kind of exclusive, being in the “In” — which is hysterically funny if you knew this person at all, one of the most self-effacing and modest people I know, with a world-class talent. But I digress.

What most attracts me to writing about this dish is a topic I come back to now and again: how mutually valuable it is for chef and for guest alike to order something off menu. Our guest gets to be an integral part of the process — which is a blast. And the chef gets to step outside his/her daily routine and get creative with whatever is on hand or whatever is super fresh that day. Very few people go down this road. Which is a real miss, as far as I’m concerned.

And in leads me into the subject of conformity, the tendency to have what everyone else is having. Why? What’s the point? When I go into restaurants, or when I used to go into restaurants (it’s been a while), my preference is/was to order whatever the chef felt particularly excited about that day, whatever something he/she would be his/her name on. t’s all about surprise and delight. Not put a check mark next to some celebrity dish that everyone else before you has tried and swears by. I think my special guest would agree.