I Couldn’t Help but Wonder, Can a Salad Really be Magic?

Welcome to #EmerilHive, a weeklyish newsletter by Becca Thimmesch. This week, I got extremely distracted at dinner.

I simply must tell you all that I saw Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick at Via Carota in the West Village this weekend. 

Backtracking roughly 30 minutes, our night begins as my sister and I are preparing to leave, when my friend texts me that Amy Sedaris is at our restaurant, waiting for a table. 

Cut to me on the snowy street, arms outstretched, planting my feet in a sort-of modified Ric Flair walk, trying to keep my balance in my gorgeous, tragically impractical heels. 

My reduced gait added time I simply could not afford and, when I arrived, Amy was nowhere to be found. As I glanced around in abject despair, who did I see but SJP and the gracefully-aged Ferris Bueller, sitting down to dinner at a corner table. 

I promise I will discuss food soon, but please let me tell you what she was wearing. TV’s Carrie Bradshaw was out to dine at one of Manhattan’s most iconic restaurants in a sweatshirt and jeans, her hair in unkempt braids. All accented by a carpet-ready smokey eye. Flawless!

Each on our second Campari, my friend and I let out a collective gasp as a server delicately placed two towering green salads in front of Broadway’s power couple. 

If you are also as obsessed with both New York restaurant culture and The Producers (2005) as we are, you may already recognize this as significant. But allow me to digress further. 

Should I maybe one day unpack my need to know everything about every place I may ever one day dine? Sure. In the meantime, is it helpful and sometimes exciting to have an extensive Google doc network of all of the food and restaurant trends in roughly a dozen cities? Absolutely. 

For a few years, the insalata verde at Via Carota was merely a blip on one such Google doc, spurred by an artful Instagram post featuring the gorgeous greens I’d seen somewhere around late 2016.

Then, last year, Samin Nosrat, of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat fame, wrote about it for the New York Times, calling it The Best Green Salad in the World.

Nosrat describes fiending for this salad, visiting the restaurant twice a day for it. Spending years pondering what makes it so good. Finally asking for the recipe and, to her surprise, finding that there is no secret ingredient, no teaspoon of sugar or dash of MSG driving its deliciousness (we’re not doing MSG discourse I promise). Instead, as she transcribes the recipe for Times readers, she reveals that the salad isn’t much more than quality greens, prepared lovingly and drizzled with a subtle-yet-perfect dressing.  

Tired of not living in the West Village, I followed the recipe exactly, something I never do, last summer.

It was delicious. But I will literally never make it again. 

I’m serious. If you see me at the Logan Circle Whole Foods buying frisée and endive and watercress and butter lettuce, please tackle me. I can’t afford all those boutique greens! 

But a restaurant can, and in bulk! And their prep cooks can spend all morning triple-washing five different delicate lettuces (at three different temperatures), hand-selecting each perfect leaf for service. Mincing shallots and whisking huge quantities of vinaigrette and plating ten at once. And it’s perfect and understated every time. 

I’ve never carried any misapprehensions about restaurant dining. I know most soups are boil-in-bag and you maybe shouldn’t order the fish special on Mondays, et cetera. I know that kitchens can be fraught and servers can lie to your face and you’re paying through the nose for a cocktail, but even knowing how the sausage is made doesn’t dull my wonderment at the sausage. I think restaurant dining is about so much more than the food itself, that dining out has the power to shape our relationships to each other, to our respective cities, to ourselves.

And this particular night, at this particular restaurant, was especially transcendent. Shedding my coat as I was handed a fresh Negroni, my friend deftly arguing our wait down from two hours to twenty minutes, gesticulating wildly to our waiter as we stressed the importance of our 8 pm curtain, it all falling perfectly into place. 

“One course ONLY, ladies!” he’d practically yelled over the din of the crowded dining room. 

We harriedly ordered the salad, tuscan beans, a tonnarelli cacio e pepe (s/o last week’s episode), and a pappardelle with wild boar. 

I don’t remember exactly what we even talked about. I remember laughing amongst ourselves, laughing with our waiter. I remember saying “these beans!” like six times. I remember feeling remarkably nourished, warm with food and Italian spirits and the company of the entire restaurant. And of course, I remember locking eyes with Sarah, hers shockingly blue, doing my best close-lipped Samantha Jones smile as if to say, I love you, I’m still thinking about that one Oscars look, can you tell your husband I said hi?

But more than anything. I remember each bite of that perfect salad. 

It encapsulated everything I love about dining out. I could make it at home, I have made it at home. But there’s no replicating the exact experience because it’s so situational, it’s part of the magic that Via Carota has created for themselves, so inherent to that tiny corner of our world, to that salvaged furniture and those huge menus and delicate glasses.

I don’t just feel this way about 18 dollar side salads. In fact I probably feel this way about dozens if not hundreds of dishes, from big to small, across my favorite restaurants in the world. Perhaps the best example, though, is actually the—uh—orange sauce(?) at Mi Cuba Cafe in Columbia Heights, which I would bathe in if given the chance. Like Samin, I never thought to ask how it was made because I never really thought I had the right to know. Only last spring did I hear our waitress explaining to a man seated at the bar, in Spanish, how it was made.

(Spoiler: most of your favorite restaurant condiments are like 90% mayonnaise or sour cream or both)

But I’ll probably never attempt it. I like the way they bring it out in tiny little ramekins, the way it soaks into the platanos maduros and glimmers against the black congri. To me, it’s magic.

Which dishes are magic for you? I’d love to know, so send me an email or a tweet.

Emeril Update

Another week down, I’m still thrilled to announce that, at time of writing, Emeril Lagasse does not appear to have died or been accused of sexual harassment. He did, however, do this interview about his restaurants in which he didn’t say anything problematic. Keep on truckin!