Having been a hash slinger for a little bit, I might add a few observations. For one, the lettuce is fresher, because restaurants use a ton of it and it is freshly washed and chilled by the time it is used. For another, most bulk salads are chopped and mixed in a huge mass, rapidly, then chilled and not allowed time to wilt or age. A secret is to keep greens, like lettuce types, celery and wiltables like spinach and parsley in chilled water until needed. It keeps them crisp.
Wilted greens can be restored if you soak them in chilled water for several hours. Try it. Add greed food coloring to the water and they’ll draw it up and look greener.
Salad dressings, oils, vinegar’s and such come in bulk containers. Fresh dressings are time honored recipes, made fast and sure. Nothing sits around long in a restaurant kitchen in the way of greens, including spicy types like onions, garlic, fresh sage and so on. The storage of fresh greens is also larger, being in bigger refrigerators, which are opened and closed more than yours at home. Often, we stored big bowls of already sliced and diced green, red and yellow peppers, ripped up lettuce, and shredded onions in these things, prepared that morning for the lunch and dinner rush, and emptied them frequently.
I preferred not to use those damn salad shredders and if I had to, I made sure to remove things from the peppers, like the core and seeds that certain, predominate, popular restaurants of common type do not do.
Then again, a stranger will not fix your salad they way you do, nor the dressing and after he or she has done it around 10,000 times, it becomes more or less a habit to fix it in a certain way. Like, you already know how much Mayo is on a spoon to plop in, or how much pepper comes out of the shaker in a dash, or how much crushed garlic to scoop up from the condiment bowl and even how hard to rub a clove of garlic on the inner side of the glass surface by habit. Cooks don’t think about it, they just do it and do it fast. Every surface, in a good restaurant, is also kept clean and their tomatoes do not sit in the fridge, half sliced, for the night.
I also find that cooks making my salads make them taste different from what I make and it depends on the restaurant. No sub shop is going to make a good salad, nor is a Wendy’s, Burger King or MacDonalds, The Italian eatery down the place will, so will that medium priced restaurant and that Rib place and if you buy a salad wrapped in plastic wrap, well, don’t expect miracles.
A last thought here also. Some places, due to the need for speed, make up their own dressings in the morning in big quantities, then pre-make salads in big bowls, using the minimum of veggies. A green salad might consist only of chunks of lettuce, with a little green pepper and onion and a few chunks of tomato wedges scooped from a standing bowl and dropped on top. Premade salads will consist mainly of the cheapest vegetables, usually lettuce, that will not easily wilt, looks good and holds up well to being placed in a view through display on ice for you but the longer a salad sits, dressed or undressed, the more it will change it’s flavor.
Fresh is best.
