Usually salad, but it depends on what kind of soup is offered.
Why not both?
Generally I go with soup in cold weather and salad in hot.
Unless the place is known for their soups, I’m going for the salad every time.
Salad by default, but I could be won over by a nice soup on occasion.
I admire your spirit of adventure; the worst bad soup in the world is a bad New England clam chowder.
I’ll take an indifferent NE clam chowder over the best Rhode Island clam chowder. Bleah. Hot clam juice with a few things in it. Now THAT’s bad soup.
I do go for a good “red” clam chowder (aka Manhattan) when it’s offered.
Salad. Soup invariably ends up spotting the tie.
I detest salad bars. Usually I do, I have seen some nice ones. But even then I feel like the restaurant has tricked me into doing their job for them, just like the self checkout lines. People get paid for making salads and checking out groceries, but if I do it I have to pay them. I can’t encourage that kind of thing.
I love salad bars myself. Prefer that most of the time over what you get from the kitchen, even if it’s a single trip.
Ditto. With a salad bar you can customize your grazing and skip all the chef’s lawn clippings they try to serve at most places. Beats ordering a salad and spending 5 minutes telling the waitron what not to put on it.
Salad. I don’t get any at home (I can’t keep salad mix around enough) and I really don’t like soup at all.
Until restaurants get over their obsession with arugula, I’ll have soup.
Salad bars, on the other hand, can be good or not. There, I get to choose what to put in my salad.
I actually like salads and eat them quite often. I had a salad for lunch today.
But I find that the salads that restaurants offer as a side are usually pretty sad; generally iceberg lettuce, a couple of slices of cucumber, and a slice of tomato.
So the soup’s usually a better bet.
Because many restaurants offer a choice of soup OR salad. :rolleyes:
Salad every time. Soup is not food.
Both!
No, it really depends on how warm it is outside. If it’s cold, I want soup and a garden salad. If it’s warm, I want a green salad topped with well-cooked cold fish or chicken or steak.
It will almost certainly be one of the two. Variety is good.
Don’t want to derail the thread with a clam chowder discussion, but I always order the local variety when I visit Rhode Island. No milky or tomatoey distraction from the clam broth, salt pork, onions, and loads of clams. If you love clams a lot, this should be the choice.
A lousy New England clam chowder can be stodgy with excess flour, bland with an overabundance of milk and/or potato, and weak from a skimpy cook’s hand with the clams, ALL AT THE SAME TIME.
I agree that a good Manhattan clam chowder is a fine alternative, but it rarely shows up on New York menus. And is utterly absent anywhere to the northeast of here.
The urban legend of New Englanders’ complaints that tomatoes and clams together in a pot is sacrilege was debunked years ago by food historian John Thorne, who pointed out that Italians started mixing them as soon as the tomato arrived from the New World. Waiter, bring me vongole alla posillipo, with extra bread for dunking.