Reporting From the Salad Capital of The World, Pt. 2

A very opinionated, deeply researched treatise on the best salads in L.A.

Salad Forever is a three-part series in pursuit of L.A.’s best salads. Today’s letter is part two of an essay that takes you through the salad history and landscape of Los Angeles, exploring dominant salad categories through critical observations. You can read part one here. On Friday, part three will drop—the ranked list of my top 15 salads, plus a special salad-related announcement.

Picking up from where we left off in Part 1, the next category of salad is fundamentally of Los Angeles and thus requires significant dissection.

Chopped

As previously mentioned, the chopped salad was invented at the Beverly Hills restaurant La Scala, where it consists of a mountain of julienned iceberg lettuce, many tiny shreds of mozzarella, garbanzo beans, a couple of olives, and your choice of salami, chicken, turkey, or tuna. The secret-recipe vinaigrette is named after its inventor, Jean Leon. Before I tear it to pieces, much like the salad itself, allow me to pay my respects. I received some meaningful feedback on part one of this story, which is that precedence matters. “Joan’s Chinese chicken is about seniority!” wrote the culinary producer Alex Menache, and I don’t disagree. Another deep-rooted Angeleno, in a private text exchange about the La Scala chopped, said: “It’s kind of equivalent to the Joan’s Chinese chicken… there’s something nostalgic, so we have to defend them. Even if they are kind of nasty.” To which I say, yes, these are important salads (even if they are kind of nasty). Joan’s CCS walked so Café Telegrama’s could run, and the same goes for the La Scala chopped and other versions across town, most notably my favorite of the classic choppeds, which I’ll get to shortly.

And yet. When lettuce is chopped as finely as it is at La Scala, not to mention iceberg lettuce, which is 96% water (see “Wedge” below), the dish becomes more like a giant puddle than a plate of food. This is the salad’s fundamental problem and also its defining trait. La Scala regulars likely want to have water for lunch, so I’ll give the golden-ager points for catering to its clientele. On a recent visit, I ordered the turkey chopped and felt that it was perfectly palatable, resembled bird food, and needed both acid and salt. The portion is generous, but when there’s so much of nothing, it’s like “eating air,” which is how my mom likes to describe a salad that will leave you hungry in an hour. Javier Ramos, a private chef in Beverly Hills, posits that La Scala’s “julienne everything” mentality is endemic of all chopped salads in Beverly Hills, where they were born and reign. He says these salads are underseasoned because when lettuce is chopped that finely, it’s “gonna be goo if they salt.”

The La Scala turkey chopped, before and after the mix.

The Chopped at Tower Bar is too chopped, but the larger issue I have with it is an excess of dried oregano. Unsurprisingly, it’s not good; Tower Bar is for vibes, and the only things anyone should consume here are martinis, pigs in a blanket, and maybe an order of fries. Oregano, particularly dried oregano, is something that should be used sparingly, in my opinion. There’s one person that gets away with a generous sprinkling, though, and that’s Nancy Silverton. Her Nancy’s Chopped Salad is just shy of 20 years old, having debuted on the opening menu at Pizzeria Mozza in 2006. The salad is so iconic that Sweetgreen offered its own iteration (in collaboration with Nancy, of course) for a span of 2018. To check in on it, I invited Los Angeles Times restaurant critic Bill Addison to Pizzeria Mozza for dinner, where we shared a salad, a squash blossom pizza, and a butterscotch budino. What’s great about Nancy’s version, first and foremost, is the size of her chop: not too fine, but rather medium-sized strips. She uses iceberg and radicchio, which creates for a sturdier base, in addition to red onion, provolone, pepperoncini, and cherry tomatoes, then tosses everything in a lemon-y oregano vinaigrette. It’s inspired by an Italian-American antipasto platter, and it tastes exactly like one, in salad form.

While I’m not head over heels for Nancy’s Chopped, I find it satisfying and consistently delicious. It stands the test of time. Addison agreed and made a compelling point: Southern California is the home of bougie salads and cheffy vegetable-forward cooking, and it’s also where so many restaurants become global chains (McDonald's, Panda Express, Taco Bell, etc), which situates Nancy’s Chopped as dominantely middlebrow. The salad holds such cultural weight in L.A. because it’s accessible, familiar, and just-the-right-amount elevated. Better yet, it makes a case for Los Angeles cuisine abroad: you can find it on the menu at Pizzeria Mozza in London and the Singapore outpost of Osteria Mozza.

From bad to very good: Lodge Bread, Angelini, Pizzeria Mozza.

There is a lot of range within the category of the chopped. At the Italian trattoria Angelini, there are two on the menu: the vegetarian Osteria Chopped, with cannellini beans, cucumber, avocado, pistachio, and Parmigiano Reggiano, and the Alimentari Chopped with chicken, avocado, bacon, celery, almonds, and currants. Both are made with soft, delicate greens, and each is balanced, luxurious, and superbly suited to a chic Italian lunch amongst a midday clientele mainly over the age of 60. Meanwhile, Lodge Bread (Culver City, Beverly Hills, Woodland Hills) serves a Chop Salad with a more typical Italian-American flavor profile. This salad was recommended by many sources, and honestly, I hated it. The dressing is too sweet (a major pet peeve of mine), and some of the lettuce is borderline spiky. As for the nutritional yeast, it adds umami, yes, but also an unwelcome graininess to the salad’s overall texture. The worst part about this salad is the oversized ingredients, particularly the chunks of fontina cheese. A chopped salad should never require knifework. A wedge, on the other hand…

Wedge

The wedge is the opposite of a chopped, at least in that it’s designed to be cut into bite-sized pieces after it hits the table, not before. It’s also a tougher salad to nail, with stricter rules. A wedge salad must begin with iceberg lettuce—which, as we now know, is 96% water—and be complemented with a considerable amount of blue cheese dressing and fatty, crispy bacon bits to balance it out. At Lasita, there’s a vegetarian Filipino riff on a wedge, called the Vedge. It has radish sticks, crispy garlic and shallot, and a generous ladle of coconut green goddess dressing that’s still insufficient to combat the water content, even if the flavors meld nicely. Great wedge salads are almost exclusively found at great American steakhouses, which is not a restaurant style Los Angeles excels in. Chi Spacca doesn’t count. Jar, I’d argue, does, but sadly, their wedge is bare-bones and skippable. Dear John’s is somewhat of a steakhouse, but their wedge is depressingly underdressed. Dry scraps of lettuce by the end? No, thank you. The best wedge I’ve found—and the favored wedge amongst my outer circle—is, yep, you guessed it, the Found Oyster wedge. It has ample blue cheese dressing, smokey bacon to up the ante, cherry tomatoes for appreciated acid, and chopped chives for elegance. Ultimately, the wedge is no match for America’s best salad (which was actually invented in Mexico): the Caesar.

Lasita Vedge, Found Oyster Wedge.