Ordering a salad out

Order the salad with a protein you can see, like grilled chicken, fish, eggs, tofu or beans, and add beans or corn if they’re offered. Get an oil-based dressing on the side and pour a spoon or two. Fried chicken, croutons and a full cup of creamy dressing can push a salad past 600 calories.

Why a restaurant salad surprises people

“I had a salad” can mean almost anything. It might be grilled fish on greens with beans, or crispy chicken under croutons, cheese and a cup of ranch. Both are on the same menu under the same word, and one can have hundreds more calories than the other.

Ordering “a salad” is like ordering “a sandwich”. The word tells you the shape of the food and nothing about what’s inside it.

Two salads off the same menu

We built both from the USDA food tables the bowl builder uses, on 3 cups of romaine, and graded them for a 170 lb person eating 2,000 calories over three meals.

The grilled bowl has more food in it, by weight and by protein and fiber, for fewer calories. The difference is the cooking of the chicken, the beans in place of the croutons, and how much dressing went on.

How to order, step by step

1. Find the protein. Grilled chicken, steak, salmon, shrimp, tuna, eggs, tofu or beans. If you can’t see a protein in the description, add one.
2. Add something with fiber. Black beans, chickpeas, lentils, corn or a scoop of grains.
3. Get the dressing on the side. Pick an oil-based one if there is one. Pour a spoon or two, or dip your fork in it before each bite.
4. Keep one crunchy topping. Croutons, crispy tortilla strips, bacon bits and candied nuts are the first to go.
5. Check whether it’s a starter. A side salad with dressing is about 160 calories with 3 g of protein. It’s a good start to a meal, and you’ll want a main.

Dressing on the side, by the numbers

A fluid ounce is 2 tablespoons, so a 2 oz cup holds 4. Poured over the whole salad, that’s about 256 calories of ranch, 320 of caesar or 360 of a 3 to 1 olive oil vinaigrette. Use half the cup and you’ve saved half of that, and you can see what you used.

Take a chicken caesar with an ounce of croutons and parmesan. With a full 2 oz cup of caesar it’s about 661 calories, a B on the bowl builder, with about 1,320 mg of sodium, more than half the 2,300 mg Daily Value on a food label. With the dressing on the side, about 1½ tablespoons used and the croutons left off, it’s about 330 calories with 34 g of protein and still a B, since it’s now light for a meal. Add half a cup of chickpeas if they’re offered and it’s an A.

Don’t swap to fat-free to save calories. Some fat on the salad is what lets you absorb the beta-carotene in the vegetables, and with fat-free dressing almost none of it gets in.

Salad chains and posted calories

If the menu posts calories, look at the dressing line on its own, since it’s often the biggest number after the protein, and check whether the bowl’s total includes the dressing. The salads people order shows the usual ones counted part by part, with the total at 1, 2 and 4 tablespoons of dressing.

The best case against fussing

“I eat out once a week. A salad is a salad.” If it’s once a week, order what you like. Where this pays off is the person eating a salad lunch out most days, often to lose weight, where the difference between the crispy bowl and the grilled one is about 80 calories a day before the dressing and a few hundred with it. Over a month of weekday lunches, a few hundred calories a day comes to several thousand.