| A garnish...or a mess? |
restaurants and was served an overdressed pile of greens with a heaping
helping of commercially manufactured croutons that were too small to be
speared with a fork. The ideal sprinkling of croutons is supposed to
be garnish, but this Caesar looked like someone had coated the lettuce with breakfast cereal.
How did it come to this?
Croutons date back to the 16th century as a way to
creatively use stale bread. Today's croutons aren't about frugality,
though. Restaurant patrons have become accustomed to having crunchy
little cubes of bread -- toasted, not stale -- tossed in their salads.
The best are made in-house (yes,
from stale bread or rolls) by tossing the cubed bread in a saute pan
with butter or a little olive oil. A few of these in a salad are a nice
touch. Too many and it's not a salad anymore but an exploded sandwich.
Which brings me back to that Hereford Caesar and its tasteless crouton overkill.
"Did these come out of a big bag?" I asked the server.
"No," he said. "A big tin. We used to make our own croutons, but not anymore."
Et tu, Hereford? Et tu?
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The house-made croutons on the Lidia's delightfully-overdressed Caesar kick all sorts of ass.
There's so much wrong with that salad, in a perfectly perfect way. Good lord, I could make a meal of it any day of the week. And considering how much dressing they put on it, it's probably calorically close to a full meal anyway.
And even though it's a chain, Ruby Tuesday's deep-fried, slightly chewy pumpernickel croutons are another thing of beauty.
Couldn't be with you more on those desiccated cubes of compressed, crisped hay on most salads. Why bother? They detract in almost all cases.
I thoroughly doubt YOUR so- called "statistics" David, and I was in the industry a good deal longer -- and carried out a lot more Caesar salads. And, I might note, never heard ONE request for ranch dressing on a Caesar salad in nearly two decades as a waiter. And who said anything about bread being free to restaurant owners? As for store-bought croutons: they were awful in the 1970s and '80s and they're bad now. Customers don't "ask for them" because most diners don't know the difference, frankly. The point to the post was that manufactured crotons are not very good and there's no reason they should be dumped on a salad.
Congratulations Charles you are officially a statistical outlier. I guarantee that for every one person who complains about too many croutons they have three who ask for their Caesar with ranch dressing. I would say the number is even higher for people who would prefer store bought croutons over paying an extra couple dollars for fresh croutons. The bread fairy doesn't actually deliver free bread to restaurants and costs must be controlled as diners are spending less. Besides, Mr Anderson has some additional expenses outside of the restaurant to cover nowadays.
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