The best salads in New York City

The ceiling and walls are hung with pipes, some from such long-ago Keens regulars as Babe Ruth, J.P. Morgan and Teddy Roosevelt. Even in these nonsmoking days, you can catch a whiff of the restaurant’s 120-plus years of history. It’s a classic scene for a classic steak—Sirloin and porterhouse (for two or three) hold their own against any steak in the city—and a good steakhouse wedge, with Iceberg dressed traditionally with blue-cheese dressing, chopped tomatoes and bacon crumbles.

At this SoCal-inspired café, the lineup can change weekly. Expect colorful plates with equal parts Japanese, South American and Mediterranean influences like a bonito-chili–spiced black-rice bowl loaded with sweet potato and eggplant, and braised chicken in stick-to-your-ribs apricot couscous. Pump up a simple summer salad of cucumber and watermelon radish with seared tuna, hard-boiled eggs and avocado.

In a white-tiled slip of an East Village eatery, former James Beard Award-winning Del Posto pastry great and erstwhile punk-rock drummer Brooks Headley gives his uberpopular veggie burger pop-up the brick-and-mortar treatment, offering the namesake patty, tofu-cabbage wraps and this bold salad, a toss of burnt broccoli, red chilies and cashews over a spice-cooling smear of creamy eggplant purée. 

The return of Andrew Carmellini—who many moons ago executed classics under Gray Kunz at Lespinasse— to French food at Lafayette was rightfully anticipated. The menu is suffused with all sorts of French classics you’ll want to eat, including a beautiful salade niçoise, updating the classic combination of tomatoes, olives, French green beans and anchovies with seared toro tuna.

Grains are at a premium at High Street—head baker Alex Bois’s astonishing loaves (potent New World ryes, hearty German-style vollkornbrot) obliterate the idea of bread as mere mealtime filler. Those ancient grains are pulled into a salad with roasted beets, smoked cloumage, puffed rice and a maple-mustard vinaigrette.  

The fashionably cookie-cutter decor—exposed brick, globe lights, hulking marble bar, you know the drill—suggests you’ve stumbled into another bustling rustic restaurant-cum-bar; they’re as ubiquitous now as Citi Bikes. Far less common are talents like Ignacio Mattos, who has reined in his modernist tendencies at Estela, with an ever-changing, mostly small-plates menu that pivots from avant-garde toward intimate, bridging the gap between space-age Isa and the homey Italian he used to cook at Il Buco. One such plate is his cool, crisp endive salad, featuring pale petals of endive tossed with walnuts, anchovy and Ubriaco Rosso cheese in a white-wine vinaigrette fragrant with orange zest.

They’ve already tackled omakase sushi and rooftop cocktailing inside the Park South Hotel; now Boston-based couple Tim and Nancy Cushman (O Ya, the Roof at Park South) are getting into the pizza-and-pasta business with this 70-seat Mediterranean dining room. Here, he kitchen modifies a traditional Roman cacio e pepe by subbing out pasta for shaved asparagus in this fresh salad, tangled with Pecorino in a champagne vinaigrette.

At the front of the brick-walled, three-tiered dining room, you’ll find a takeout deli and bakery turning out Ashkenazic curios like whorled poppy-seed rugelach ($2) and chunky whitefish salad ($10 per half pound), but the sit-down area boasts a more extensive menu, with salad bowls (Waldorf $22, Cobb $22) with ingredients arranged in precise, Instagram-ready columns.