Salad days
By Liza Weisstuch
Forget iceberg lettuce and Italian dressing. From seaweed to candied beets to smoked eggplant, these days chefs are getting increasingly creative with your first course.
There are no smells of cooking. There is no sizzle from the kitchen. Grezzo, in the North End, is a raw food restaurant (and vegan, and mostly organic) - no ingredient here ever gets warmer than 112 degrees, the temperature at which enzymes are said to be destroyed.
Once upon a time, it was all so simple. If you wanted a salad, you’d take some lettuce, slice up some cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes, and bell peppers, splash on some dressing, and presto! Fie on those who called it “bunny food.” It was nutrition on a plate. But your palate has evolved — and, thankfully, so have the salads you can get to please it.
There’s an old adage that goes, “It takes four men to dress a salad: a wise man for the salt, a madman for the pepper, a miser for the vinegar, and a spendthrift for the oil.” The insightful sage who made that remark would probably think it takes a village to dress a salad, or at least a team as big as the makeup squad backstage at a Marc Jacobs show. On most menus these days, a plate of simple greens is practically an insult, relegated to the realm of the side dish. “Salad” has become a term of prestige, a vehicle with which chefs can bend boundaries and demonstrate their creativity, combining vegetables in neverbeforeconsidered combinations. If you think that sounds like an overstatement, try some of these manipulations of Mother Nature’s finest.
Ursalads
Grezzo (69 Prince Street, Boston, 857.362.7288), an intimate, perpetually packed restaurant in the North End, looks like your standard Italian trattoria. But looks can be deceiving. The word here is “raw” — as in, no food item is heated over 112 degrees, and everything is organic and vegan. In the lingua franca of raw foodistry, “salad” almost seems an adjective. The spring vegetable lasagna ($22) is nothing short of salady, what with all sorts of vegetables pickled and otherwise enhanced, layered with intriguing nutbased Béchamel “cheese” and an almost weightless housemade pomodoro sauce. But that’s not to say the concept is so radical as to disavow the notion of salad. In fact, you can order a house salad ($11) here; says executive chef Leah Dubois, “We take classic components and mess with them. The goal is to make it the best salad anyone ever had. Achieving that goal is constantly evolving.” Such “messing” could involve marinating (a spectrum of radishes), pickling (the cauliflower), or soaking until sprouting occurs (garbanzo beans). Also pushing serious boundaries is the seaweed salad ($13). A far cry from the glistening yet oddly gummy emerald filaments you’ll find at your corner sushi stop, this composition is a quartet of seaweed varieties — kelp, dulse (which arrives airdried and is rehydrated with the use of mushroom tea), nori, and sea beans, which look like anorexic twigs of asparagus and have a briny zing. Finished with Japanese horseradish vinaigrette, the end result is salty, spicy, nourishing and — oh yeah — healthy.