Mar 24, 2011 “Cucumbers as bricks, corns and dry grapes as patches, and salad sauce as cement”
In Bangkok in the mid-’90s, my boyfriend and I would go to Pizza Hut on special occasions like birthdays and payday. Compared to Los Angeles, the city was super accessible to the young and the skint, but Western food (even the crap fast kind) was an extravagance. It was at a Sizzler–our anniversary!–that I first saw a man use a mobile phone at the dinner booth. He was smiling into one of those big beige bricks that people strapped to their belts like heat but looked like a take-along floppy drive if not set next to a bottle of Johnny Walker Black (when it looked like money). Not to get all political, but it was phones like that that made Thaksin Shinawatra the very rich corrupt (ex-)leader he is today…
Fast forward to today today, when my friend sent me this: How to Beat the Salad Bar, in which Nate Silver, writing for the New York Times, offers practical advice on how to get the most for your dollar at, say, the Whole Foods. You just have to think about it, he says: If the salad bar is $7.99/pound, then load up on the otherwise $9.99/pound sun-dried tomatoes. Brilliant! I thought–and then I remembered my old Bangkok Pizza Hut with the coldest air-con 🙁 and greatest salad engineers :).
In Thailand and, it turns out, until recently in China, Pizza Hut’s salad bar wasn’t all-you-can-eat but priced per bowl and one-time trip. Suffice it to say, Pizza Hut’s customers had given these restrictions a lot of thought: With weight a non-issue, what emerged was a salad bar strategy focused on best engineering. The standard method went something like this:
1. Start with a foundation of yogurt or cottage cheese and the heaviest fruit items
2. Erect a perimeter wall of carrot or celery sticks to lend the bowl extra depth
3. Layer on various ingredients, using dressings, mayo-based salads, or strawberry mousse as mortar
4. Dump it all out onto extra plates for the table
Most of the photos online are from China, represent the extreme, and were popularized by sites like Boing Boing and Weird Asia News, but the videos are more everyday. Click here for the least offensive and least talky one.
By the bye, does anyone know if the Pizza Huts in India still have dancing waiters?