Reporting From the Salad Capital of The World, Pt. 1

A very opinionated, deeply researched treatise on L.A.'s best salads.

Salad Forever is a three-part series in pursuit of L.A.’s best salads. Today’s letter is part one of an essay that takes you through the salad history and landscape of Los Angeles, exploring dominant salad categories through critical observations. Next week, part two will drop, followed by part three—the ranked list of my top 15 salads.

I started coming to Los Angeles when I was 11 years old. It was 2004, the same year my uncle Jerry, his wife Dana, and their two young kids moved from Manhattan to Venice. Because my mom has always been close to her brother, she and my dad subsequently decided that we’d spend one week in L.A. every year, during spring break. We’d shop at Fred Segal, wander The Original Farmers Market, visit Disneyland, and eat salads. Dana, a self-acknowledged health nut who was born in Queens but came of age in West L.A., was our guiding light. She took us to Joan’s on Third for Chinese chicken salads served in steel mixing bowls and to Gelson’s for tubs of the stuff from the deli case. She introduced us to Abbot Pizza Company’s “Salad Pizza,” a pie invented in 1995 and topped with melted cheese, sour cream, chopped salad, and sliced avocados. And she took us to The Ivy, where I became enamored with the grilled vegetable salad comprised of baby lettuce, asparagus, zucchini, corn, tomatoes, avocado, and scallions (add shrimp).

Behold the Salad Pizza. Photo credit: Slice.

It’s been 15 years since my last meal at The Ivy. In 2018, Jonathan Gold called the erstwhile celebrity haunt “uniquely horrible.” While researching this story, I made plans to return, but after luring my mother to join me for lunch “for old time’s sake,” I called an audible. The vibe was very off, the prices were exorbitant ($45 with shrimp), and anyways, I had already revisited the grilled vegetable salad at Fresh Corn Grill, a fast-casual joint in WeHo and Westwood started by former cooks of the waned and weathered West Hollywood restaurant. There was no need to punish myself, I reasoned. We went to South Beverly Grill instead.

Over the course of the last three months, I’ve consumed a great deal of salad. I sought out 50 specific salads across town in pursuit of the most delicious, quintessential salads in Los Angeles, sampling salads of lore and promising new entries to the salad scene. I couldn’t, obviously, try every salad. I skipped some because of poor reviews from several trusted sources (sorry, McCarthy Salad). Others I hoped to get to but couldn’t make it in time, namely the duck salad at El Monte’s Pho Vit 115.

In actuality, I’ve eaten many more than 50 salads. Salad, after all, is a cornerstone of L.A. cuisine and culture. Whenever I eat out, unless it’s at a sushi counter or taco stand, there’s almost always a salad on the table. Our best chefs cook seasonally, shop at the farmers’ market, and let produce lead the way. As a result, the most satisfying dish at any given restaurant in town tends to be a salad. Furthermore, history dictates that Los Angeles is the epicenter of American salad. For well over a century now, there has been no better place in the world to enjoy a bountiful bowl of greens, vegetables, protein, and dressing than right here.

As the food writer and historian Charles Perry argued in a 2003 Los Angeles Times article titled “The salad eaters,” the abiding Angeleno obsession with salad can be attributed to three factors:

1. Year-round access to fresh vegetables

2. A warm climate that gives us “a natural taste for cold foods” and powers a lifestyle of casual (oftentimes al fresco) dining

3. The welcoming of the health food movement with open arms. “Hollywood, in particular, proved highly susceptible to salad mania,” he writes.

L.A. is the birthplace of the Cobb salad (1930s, Brown Derby, Hollywood), the chopped salad (1950s, La Scala, Beverly Hills), and the Chinese chicken salad (1960s, Madame Wu’s Garden, Santa Monica), two of which have Hollywood origin stories. At La Scala, the restaurateur Jean Leon suggested fine-chopping the house salad so that it was tidier for fancifully dressed stars to eat, while Sylvia Wu, chef-owner of Madame Wu’s Garden, came up with the original recipe for Chinese chicken salad at the request of Cary Grant. Since then, Angelenos have discussed business over salad by day, enjoyed tableside Caesar preparations come night, and made dutiful visits to particular restaurants for their famed lettuce-based creations.

Now that we’ve established some history, I want to take a moment to define salad in the case of this particular treatise on the topic. Salad exists across various food cultures and can be expressed in several different forms. Larb is a ground meat and herb salad from Thailand, while Caprese is Italian for a mozzarella, tomato, and basil salad. There are fruit salads, salads bound by mayonnaise and commonly served in delis (i.e., chicken, tuna, and egg salad), and produce-specific composed salads, like a citrus or a carrot salad. For my purposes, lettuce is essential, and main course salads have been prioritized. In this essay, I will hone in on salads based on greens and tossed in dressing.

In early January, I asked Instagram for recommendations for L.A.’s best salads, and I received more DMs than ever in my life. It took me days to sort through the hundreds of cases you made for your favorites. I regret not using a Google Form. While I have no way of knowing whether the same fervor would’ve emerged if I were searching for the best salads in New York, I’m pretty sure that I struck a Los Angeles chord. Only in the salad-abundant landscape of L.A. is the passion for dressed greens and mix-ins so potent.

One takeaway is that nostalgia drives the salad tastes of born-and-bred Angelenos, like pizza in New York, burritos in San Francisco, or breakfast tacos in Austin. As my friend Shelby, who grew up in Calabasas, put it over salads (one chopped, one Chinese chicken, both modified to her liking) at Stanley's in Sherman Oaks: “When I want a great classic salad that hits the spot, and is fresh, I think of the valley.” It was a Wednesday winter afternoon, and the frankly hideous dining room was packed with pairs of senior women. Soaking up the midday scene at L.A.’s salad-centric restaurants was the highlight of my research, whether at Green Street in Pasadena (mostly retired couples and four-tops of blonde bobs) or Leora, the café inside United Talent Agency, which buzzes with intern energy and Hollywood deal-making.

A few of my other findings are that L.A. doesn’t do Greek salad very well, but it crushes market greens and has a toxic obsession with a chop. Overdressing and overchopping are problems, especially in Beverly Hills. And the salad queen can keep her throne (that would be Gwyneth, duh).

From the standpoint of pure taste, I found salads created in the last ten years to be significantly better than salads that were long ago etched in stone. Today’s salads are more diverse, more creative, more flavorful, and more fresh, whether entirely original or a riff on a traditional format. The most successful salads are made in kitchens where the chef is sourcing at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market, not Sysco. With that said, allow me to take you on a tour of the salad topography of Los Angeles, through Chinese chicken salads, chopped salads, Caesars, and beyond. First up, the CCS.

Chinese chicken

The salad that inspired this voracious deep dive was a Chinese chicken salad, which is funny because I rarely order Chinese chicken salad. I find that the dressing is too often too sweet, plus I’m not interested in mandarin lobes or fried wontons as salad ingredients. The CCS is also just sort of… outdated? But at Café Telegrama, they do things a bit differently. Their giant, seemingly never-ending Chinese chicken salad—which we’re looking for in a main course salad—is comprised of all the obligatory ingredients, including appropriately crunchy napa cabbage, a generous portion of shredded chicken, and, most notably, crispy wonton breadcrumbs. The ingenuity of that last component made me reconsider the Chinese chicken salad and why we love it.