Salad Barring

Last weekend Christina and I went to Pizza Hut. Other than McDonald’s and KFC, Pizza Hut is about the only western food in town. It costs 5-10 times as much as a normal Chinese meal (the prices are pretty similar to the US), so it’s usually reserved for special occasions like birthdays. But on Saturday night the Brennans were gone to Beijing (probably eating yummy Mexican food) and the Hanings were having a special date night, so Christina and I decided to have our own date night.

Pizza Hut is right in the center of town and pretty much fine dining, so it’s usually really crowded on the weekends with the upper-class Chinese crowd. We were surprised to find it not very crowded at all, and while we were waiting for our takeout, we had the bench all to ourselves. We waited and watched the salad bar.

Watching people at a Chinese salad bar is always interesting. If you have never seen a salad bar in China, let me explain. First of all, the salad bar is mostly fruit and Thousand Island dressing, since an “American” salad consists of a little bit of shredded iceberg, a few shredded carrots, and one or two cherry tomatoes, all doused in Thousand Island dressing. Do you see why I’m excited about eating salad this summer?

If you order a salad bar (only found at Westernish restaurants), you are given one small bowl, about the size of a flattened McDonald’s hamburger and one trip to get your money’s worth. This one-trip rule is the reason for the birth of Chinese salad art. People spend twice as long as we would think necessary at the salad bar carefully piling up fruits and vegetables one on top of another in a precarious mound that is twice as tall as the actual bowl. Salad-barring is a skill.

On Saturday at Pizza Hut, the lady at the salad bar had this skill down to a science. First, she brought her dinner plate over to use as a prep plate. She piled the plate high with pineapple and carefully arranged the pieces around the edge of the bowl to form a wall. She kept digging out more and more pineapple, making the wall two layers high and reinforcing the cracks. The wall was twice as big as the bowl. Along the top of the wall she placed a layer of thinly sliced cucumbers. After about five minutes of working on this, she started meticulously filling the inside of her now double-sized bowl, one piece at a time. I could swear she was packing down the fruit like one packs brown sugar before measuring.

The Pizza Hut workers kept walking by and watching her, but they didn’t say anything. They are used to the salad art. They could complain about two trips to the salad bar, but not about one trip with salad art. We had to leave before she was finished. She had been at it almost ten minutes and would probably be at it at least that much longer. I’m pretty sure she got her money’s worth. I hope she didn’t drop it on the way back to her table.

(I was trying to get a picture, but I couldn't get it to turn out very well. If you look closely, the big, yellow mound in the center is her pineapple wall.)