Chef’s Salad used to be a common item on restaurant menus. Not franchises like Wendys and McDonald’s.
It was the pizza places, BBQ, Cafes that offered a Chef’s Salad.
It was packed with protein. Diced ham, boiled eggs, shredded cheddar, purple onion, black olives, cucumber, and tomatoes. Your choice of dressing.
A complete meal. I ordered a chef’s salad every week for lunch, for many years, in college and my early years working.
I have picked up the ingredients and am making a Chef’s Salad for tonights dinner. Bringing back the 1980’s.
I make a point to look for a Chef’s Salad anytime I go to a restaurant. A lot of places offer salad. But I haven’t found one that offers a traditional Chef’s Salad.
Let’s bring it back.
I rarely make them at home because of the prep. It’s more practical for a restaurant to do it on a large scale. A bowl of each item. Assemble the salad quickly.
Looking at the menus of the local places that I frequent:
One (a breakfast/lunch place) doesn’t specifically have a “Chef’s Salad” by name on the menu, but they offer a “Deli Salad” that sounds pretty much the same, ingredient-wise
Four don’t appear to offer it at all, though all of them have several other protein-inclusive salads of various sorts
If any particular sort of menu item like this doesn’t seem to be around anymore, it’s likely for one of two reasons (if not both):
Few people were ordering it, and the restaurant discontinued offering it. It might be that it went out of fashion (much like a lot of salad dressing varieties that used to be common, and are now rare), or that tastes changed. (After all, the OP is longing for the salads of 40 years ago. )
The cost of the ingredients, compared to the price which they could sell it at, led to an unacceptable profit margin.
In this case, I’d guess it’s the former.
FWIW, several articles on “here’s a bunch of foods that have disappeared from restaurant menus”:
I don’t think this is a particularly serious “why” but I’ll answer of course: price. While you can absolutely cheap out on number and quality of such ingredients as listed, the more you have the harder it is to keep in stock and fresh, especially if it’s a major secondary line to your main menu. Maybe a pizza place, if they can use the same stuff as they have on hand for their toppings might be easier, maybe that isn’t as much an issue.
Plus, a lot of places have been using whatever ‘salad’ option they have as the token offering for vegetarians and vegans, even easier to justify the lack of meat heavy salad options. I personally think that’s one of the reasons for the proliferations of various “Cesar” salads as the default. Most places it’s undifferentiated lettuce greens (none of that mixed green stuff!) a vegetarian dressing and croutons, maybe with the grated cheese on or left off as requested. Then charge a substantial surcharge to add some other lean protein for someone who needs more.
Minimal secondary ingredients, which are normally already on hand, and therefore less wastage and higher profit.
I’m live in Chicago and I know a few places where I can find some things on that list (and are quite good too like beef stroganoff or fondue). Not all and some I don’t mind are gone. Good riddance.
Mostly because of concerns about hygiene, a trend that COVID accelerated. Plus, they are apparently challenging to keep all of those lovely ingredients fresh, require staff time to maintain, and consumer preferences have shifted towards more convenient, pre-packaged “grab and go” salads.
Sometimes there 's something similar, but a little different. Here’s a salad I had last week :
Romaine, Radicchio, Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Red Onions, Pepperoncini, Peppers alla Nonna, Salami, Caciocavallo Cheese, Red Wine Vinaigrette
And here’s one at a restaurant I’m going to next week :
Honey ham, roasted artichoke, tomato, Swiss cheese, and Spanish olives with chopped romaine and spring mix lettuce.
Neither one is exactly a chef’s salad - but both have meat and cheese. I really think the boiled egg is what did in the chef’s salad - unless you are talking about a place that serves egg salad, I can’t think of anything else that uses boiled eggs other than at breakfast.
For what it’s worth, the restaurant I mentioned in my earlier post that offers a similar salad does have hard-boiled eggs in it – and they’re a breakfast-and-lunch place, which is open from 6am to 2pm, and 2/3 of their menu is breakfast items.
They still offer a prepackaged grab-n-go chef’s salad in the vending machine* at work. I would sometimes buy one on occasions when I didn’t bring enough food for lunch.
*Technically it’s not a vending machine anymore – a few years ago they replaced them with a couple of refrigerated display cases stocked with food and drinks and a self checkout machine, but same difference.
Swedish meatballs? I guess the IKEA cafeteria doesn’t count as a proper restaurant. That said, I have had Swedish meatballs at a family restaurant in the Upper Midwest in the past few years, but it’s probably true that they’re not something you can find on a typical menu elsewhere in the US, with the exception of IKEA.
Yeah, I think that those articles are more accurately, “foods which used to be common on restaurant menus, and aren’t common anymore.” I have no doubt that most, if not all, items on those lists can be found at some restaurant, somewhere.
Not here, and I love them. Most grocery stores have them. In fact I was going to have one tonight but decided to save it for lunch tomorrow. Lettuce, cherry tomato, grated cheddar (though more traditionally, blue cheese) bacon, avocado, and chives with two halves of a hard-boiled egg, all tossed in ranch dressing. It’s pretty much a meal in itself.
Funny, I was going to say that Cobb salads have sort of replaced chef’s salads at a lot of places.
To find a chef’s salad, I’d suggest checking for diner-type restaurants. (I say “diner-type” because nothing around here – San Jose, CA – would truly qualify as a diner back east.) That was the first thing I thought about, and checking around here four of the five “diners” I checked had chef’s salads on the menu.
That is to say, Cobb salads aren’t all that rare on menus, but it is hard to find one that’s right; the toppings are missing or substituted or the dressing is wrong. I’ve seen ones that use turkey or ham instead of chicken, or fried chicken instead of grilled chicken, or cheddar cheese instead of bleu, or black olives for some reason, or a ranch dressing instead of vinaigrette, and the avocado is completely missing more often than not.
)