Best New Salads

People tend to think of the salad as the dieter's dish: bland, innocuous, predictably lettucey. Not so, we say. At least not at Thai Paradise, which opened this year. The most unassuming salad there, the Paradise Salad, is a bed of lettuce with fresh cilantro and ginger, grilled shrimp and chicken, topped with a thick peanut sauce. For the more daring, there are the "yum" salads --and yes, they are as good as they sound, assuming you're willing to approach the salad-eating experience as though it were an extreme gustatory sport. It's for this reason that we recommend the Yum Seafood. Shredded lettuce sits in a mix of squid, calamari, shrimp, mussels, scallops and a few things that just taste like ocean. Other ingredients include green pepper, onion, garlic, cilantro, ginger (big chunks of it) and a really spicy hot sauce. Order a side of steamed rice and a Thai iced tea to keep your mouth from burning up. For the nonspice-loving salad adventurer, there's the papaya salad, an especially refreshing selection on a hot summer day. With salad offerings as extensive as Thai Paradise's, it's hard to imagine not finding something to make just about anyone happy, unless all you really want is the old standby. In which case, you might as well just go to a salad bar.