close

A salad worth writing about

4 min read

On the drive to the restaurant, Leslie talked about the salad.

“Best salad ever,” she said.

“I get it every time.”

I was in Connecticut for the weekend, staying in the town where we’d lived when the kids were really young. I’d not been back there in more than a decade, and everything looked different, including the avenue with all the restaurants.

My first night in town, Leslie and her husband took me to dinner there, mainly because of that salad. Without her recommendation, I would have passed right over it on the menu.

I find most restaurant side salads to be bland: iceberg lettuce with two slices of cucumber, a tomato wedge and some shredded cheddar cheese would be a forgetful snooze. Most restaurants never cut up the lettuce right, and eating it becomes tiring as I stab the lettuce chunks with the fork in an effort to break them up enough to fit into my mouth.

This description was different, though: shaved Brussels sprouts on a risotto cake topped with shaved parmesan.

“Get it,” Leslie said, and so I ordered. What arrived on a plate in front of me was a thing of such delicious beauty I’ve been chasing the memory ever since.

The salad was shaped liked a pope’s mitre. At the bottom was a golden brown rectangle of deep friend risotto; atop that was the tower of bright green shreds of Brussels sprouts which somehow stayed in formation on the trip from kitchen to table. And sitting atop all of it were some curls of parmesan.

I touched the top with my fork and the tower collapsed. For the first taste I put a bit of the risotto cake, some sprouts and a shave of cheese on the fork in a brown-green-yellow mix.

Each forkful of the crunchy risotto cake, the sprouts with the vinegary dressing and the salt of the cheese was such a perfect bite I lost track of the conversation and just ate. At some point I stopped myself, worried that I’d been shoveling it in with embarrassing gusto.

When I stopped for a sip of wine and the waiter came by ready to remove my plate, I waved him away with probably too much vigor. I might have slapped his hand if he’d touched my plate.

“Still working,” I said, and I finished the last bite.

We talked about a lot of things that weekend – the good old days when we all were raising our little kids in that town, the way the community has grown even more wealthy – but on the ride home from dinner that night, we talked only of that salad.

Back at home I checked out the restaurant’s website to see if they’d posted the recipe. Failing that, I googled “shaved Brussels sprouts salad” and found a few recipes that might be somewhat close. I plan to give a couple of them a try.

I’m thinking that a plain old hash brown patty might be a good-enough stand in for the risotto cake; I don’t remember the rice as much as the crunchy brown coating. Shaving Brussels sprouts requires a mandolin I don’t own, but I think I could slice up the sprouts by hand. And shredded parmesan would probably work just fine. The tricky part will be getting the dressing right and then building a tower from it all.

I’m hosting my daughter and her boyfriend for a pre-Thanksgiving dinner on Wednesday. I think I’ll serve that salad first. If it’s close to what I ate at the restaurant last weekend, I’ll share the recipe here. You really should try it, because it’s that good.

CUSTOMER LOGIN

If you have an account and are registered for online access, sign in with your email address and password below.

NEW CUSTOMERS/UNREGISTERED ACCOUNTS

Never been a subscriber and want to subscribe, click the Subscribe button below.

Starting at $3.75/week.

Subscribe Today