Salad Dressing Dumbfuckery

The BBQ Pit
1

There’s an element of a GQ to this, but I wanted to bitch about it too so I put it here.

My family goes out for dinner on the holiday weekend to a decent restaurant and everyone orders a salad to start. We ask for Italian, ranch, French dressing… but oh no! Nope, can’t have any of those! “We only have balsamic vinagrette dressing!” says the serving-wench.

Yeah? Well, take your balsamic vinagrette dressing, stand on your head, and pour it in your ass!

Then a few months ago I was at an Outback. A STEAK HOUSE, for the love of Christ, and what salad dressings do they have? Oil and vinegar! No French, no Italian, just oil and vinegar and I think they offered me ranch, too.

Now, if I’m at Le Plume de ma Tante Cuisine Snobbe, I sort of expect overpriced salads with no salad dressing. But I’m getting pretty fucking sick of regular restaurants that can’t even keep a fucking bottle of Kraft Thousand Islands on hand. How hard is that? EVERY party that comes in and orders a salad asks for a real dressing. Oil and vinegar isn’t salad dressing, they’re the ingredients of salad dressing. If I wanted to make my own goddamned toppings I’d have stayed at home. What’s next? “No, sir, we don’t have ice cream, but I’ll bring you a cow, a churn, and a bucket of ice.”

[GQ element] Why in the name of God do restaurants do this? [/GQ element] Well, here’s my NSWAG guess; because they’re so fucking cheap they decide to make do with random vinegar and greases they tossed together in a five-gallon bucket (that’s what “Balsamic vinagrette” is) because the evil bastards don’t offer any culinary alternative to a salad. See, if you don’t like the chicken wings you can always get potato skins, but if you want a light, green appetizer, they stick you with the fucking salad and offer nothing else, and so you have no choice but to accept the Random Dressing Concoction.

Well, the hell with that. I am standing up for my rights! The next time I’m in some restaurant that won’t offer me a real salad dressing I’m asking for the manager and telling her/him s/he is running a shitwad place and I’m yelling “Rat!” if they don’t bring me some French dressing.

2

Dude, oil and vinegar is too salad dressing!!! Fuck, that’s my fave – balsamic vingear and extra-virgin olive oil. At least then I can sort of taste my lettuce and tomatoes instead of getting a mouthload of that thousand island or sickly sweet french shit. but, hey, if your tomatoes suck and your lettuce is wilting, I too would want to cover up any trace of honest vegetable flavor.

To be fair, though, you do have reason to rant.I do find it quite odd, though, that an Outback steakhouse would only have oil and vinegar and ranch. Now why in the hell they wouldn’t supply more choices to people who obviously ask for them is beyond me.

3

Agreement with Pulykamell - if my salad is smothered in French or Italian or 1000 Islands or mayonnaise or what have you, I can’t taste the damn leaves. Oil and vinegar (maybe with some nice basil, thyme, & mustard) is where it’s at.

Oh, and here’s another salad dressing that I use but nobody else does: salt. Salt! I mean, that’s where the word comes from! “Salatum” is Latin for “salted!” Why doesn’t anyone else put salt on their salad?

4

matt_mcl I put salt on my salad too. Salt and vinagar on cucumber is just gorgeous.

And i’m with pulykamell - why would you want to drown your salad in sickly dressing? Set the salad free!

5

Brace yourself- this sounds very familar to me.
I went to a deli last week (a very popular one) and ordered coffee. The girl gives me a very odd look, then says “all we have is instant”. Instant coffee? At a deli? Ok…whatever. So she serves it up, and I ask for cream. Cream? Well, we have milk here someplace…WTF? So I say “Hey! What’s up with not having coffee? I’ve never, ever had this happen in a restaurant” and I shit you not, she says: “Well, we don’t sell much of it.”

Maybe because you SERVE FUCKING INSTANT COFFEE!!

So my point is, they probably don’t “serve” it because some dumbfuck decided that EVERYONE loves balsamic shit instead of good old, artery clogging mayo based dressing. Who knows who makes these wacky decisions, but I felt the same way. What, you can’t keep one fucking pot of coffee/bottle of salad dressing/whatever on hand? Please.

Zette

6

My favorite dressing: oil, lots-o-vinegar, lots-o-salt, mustard and tarragon.

What really irritates me about the oil and vinegar at restaurants is that they tend to give you the individual bottles, and you have to mix it on top of your salad (—> doesn’t mix well at all), and the oil bottle is usually completely covered in, well, oil.

It sounds like you had really really bad luck, RickJay…

7

RickJay, I’d like to step in and suggest that you were at a crappy Outback.

I love the Outback Steakhouse, I go often, and I always get a salad. They have the finest Honey Mustard dressing on the planet, as well as a peppercorn ranch, ceasar, creamy garlic and italian.

I don’t know where you’re from, but the Outback you frequent sounds sort of squirrely.

8

On a related note: Mr. Scarlett is the original Javahead Jones – he drinks coffee with almost any type of meal. Even at Taco Bell, fercryinoutloud! Seems like about half the time, unless we’re in a diner with one of those four-pot Bunn servers, he has to wait for his coffee because they have to start a pot.

The flip side to this is that he gets fresh coffee.

9

<Homer Simpson>

You don’t make friends with sal-AD! You don’t make friends with sal-AD!

</Homer Simpson>

Hey, man, the capitalist economic system is all about freedom of choice - for the cash I shell out for a good steak at Outback, they better give me more choices for salad dressing than just balsamic vinaigrette. Not that I have anything against vinaigrette, it’s just the principle of the thing. (Give me a good offend-everyone-nearby creamy garlic every time.)

10

Oh yes they do!!! I go the Outback often as well and I usually order two salads (I don’t eat meat) with that honey mustard vinegarette. Last time I was there, I told them they should bottle that dressing and sell it.

11

As long as this is a rant against salad dressing…Who on earth figured that the bottled crap that is labled “ceasar” was going to fool anyone. Some of it isn’t bad, but I’ll be damned if it is anything close to ceasar dressing that is made correctly.