Sweetgreen
Los Angeles-based Sweetgreen is the heavy hitter of this bunch, so I’m going to spend more space digging into the publicly traded company that once collaborated with Kendrick Lamar to create a salad called Beets Don’t Kale My Vibe.
Sweetgreen, with well over 100 locations nationwide, is slick, well-capitalized and has an overactive social media team. It sells a broad selection of salads and bowls with preselected ingredient combinations as well as build-your-own options. The company also comes as close as any quick-service restaurant has to scaling “healthy” food on a national level. Could we all be stopping at salad joints at highway rest stops instead of burger places in the future? Maybe.
Sweetgreen’s salads largely meet expectations. The Spring Asparagus salad (which has been rotated off the menu since my visit) is well served by crunchy, savory za’atar breadcrumbs and a dill-leaning green goddess dressing. A Hummus Crunch salad is again aided by the breadcrumbs, which go well with creamy hummus and briny olives — unfortunately, however, there were no chickpeas available when I went, which struck me as a key omission.
For the most part, I liked salads better than bowls, with one exception: The Harvest bowl, with goat cheese, apples, wild rice and a mouth-puckering balsamic dressing. It’s a warm, familiar combination that feels like a ’90s wormhole to a more comforting time of SnackWell’s, Nautica jackets and the art in the Gramercy Tavern dining room. Take me back, baby.
The menu is somewhat reliant on kale but also keeps romaine, spinach and arugula in heavy rotation. Whenever I got an arugula-heavy salad, the greens were quite reedy. And in some cases, some almost branch-y, as with an otherwise tasty Crispy Rice bowl.
Value here is average — most items cost less than $15. When ordering online, make sure to select extra dressing, as the default is to give you only one container, which will leave you with an underdressed salad. And there’s nothing sadder than an underdressed salad.
Mendocino Farms
The dining experience at Mendocino Farms, with dozens of California locations and a handful in Texas and Washington, is self-described as “an unexpected culinary adventure with fresh ingredients and fearless flavor combinations.” I’m not sure I agree entirely with that breathless statement, but the salads are pretty decent and the service was friendly (shoutout to Taylor at the Hollywood Boulevard location).
The Thai mango salad, with sticks of pickled daikon and carrot, sweet roasted almonds and ramen noodles, is a winner, as is the impressively tasty vegan taco salad with Impossible chorizo and slightly spicy chipotle ranch dressing. A Caesar salad with a sad, pallid chunk of avocado unfortunately came up a little short. Prices are reasonable enough — everything I tried was less than $15 — but portions seemed a little on the smaller side.
Salata
For those of you who think service doesn’t matter in restaurants anymore, especially in more casual places: You’re wrong. It still does. And props to the Salata manager at the Fashion Square mall location in the Valley, whose Harold Hill-like belief in how much I was going to love my salad actually, I think, positively influenced how much I enjoyed it.
This is primarily a build-your-own-salad place (I also ordered preset Greek and Caesar salads), and when I saw Salata had spicy giardiniera, the fiery pickled pepper mix that goes on Chicago-style Italian beef sandwiches, I knew what I had to do. I loaded up my salad with giardiniera, carrots, jalapeños, onions and other veggies, then added some chunks of steak. Voilà — I had made the salad version, kinda sorta, of the beloved sandwich.
“You’ll like this so much you’ll be coming back here two, three times a week,” the manager said. Maybe not, but I was certainly nudged in that direction.
Everytable
Everytable was founded a decade ago with the mission of bringing healthy food to parts of L.A. that have limited access to fresh fruit and vegetables. It’s a good goal, in other words. The location I visited had a manager who was very engaged and proud of the sales he’d already done that day ($1,400).
You can eat there, but the format is largely grab-and-go. They were sold out of a lot of things (again, the manager was pleased about that) but what I tried was pretty good. A Salmon Superfood salad had a generous chunk of fish, roasted sweet potato and quinoa to go with a tart cilantro lime dressing. A Lemon Pepper Chicken Caesar could have used more punch but was solid: the accompanying Parmesan black pepper dressing tasted like the dregs of a bowl of cacio e pepe.
Prices are very reasonable — both of these items were less than $10.
Chop Stop
A visit to Chop Stop feels like a trip to the early 2010s, when we were all too into bacon, Sriracha and Pinkberry (but not necessarily all at once). The building at the Glendale location seems way too big; the logo and fonts are friendly, almost cartoonish; and the restaurant, which specializes in chopped salads and Choppurritos, feels permanently trapped — in a nice way — in that era. Chop Stop has the motto “More than a salad” (cue Boston’s “More Than a Feeling”), which is proudly plastered on the wall.
Try the Santa Fe with corn, chicken, tortilla strips and cilantro lime dressing, or the Viva Mexico, with a chipotle dressing that tastes like it has a packet of taco seasoning poured into it. Prices are reasonable — in the $12 to $14 range.
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
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