Salad

If anything has shot up the restaurant charts, it’s salad. At Le Caprice, Caesar Salad is one of the top three starters. Even in the teeth of my prejudice against vegetables and salad, I must admit, it’s a pretty perfect dish. A symbiotic mixture of ingredients. Le Caprice’s is as good as it gets, unctuous without the extraneous additions like chicken breast or tuna. The habit of eating salad on its own as a separate course came from America, where else? There, the salad bar is still a weirdly staple-like feature of many restaurants. As many transatlantic media folk started asking for salads at lunch in Le Caprice, they invented a main course Mexican Chicken Salad, with avocado, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of green things. The plant that thinks it’s a steak. If you were forced to live on just one ingredient (you can’t), avocado would keep you miserably clinging to life longer than anything.