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The city has made great strides since, at least when it comes to roughage. Traditionally, ordering a salad as a meal speaks to a certain discipline and restraint. Lettuce tends not to be the stuff of last-supper fantasies, no matter how extravagantly you dress it. But today’s salad culture has turned the former side dish into a maximalist main event.

Take girl-lunch capital Mandy’s Gourmet Salads, which has mastered the magic trick of making salad-eating seem like escapist indulgence. “We call Mandy’s ‘fast fancy’ instead of ‘fast casual,’” says Rebecca Wolfe, its co-founder with her sister, the titular Mandy.

Mandy’s makes salad feel like a vacation with a side of seared tuna and status packaging

When you go to Mandy’s, you feel like you’ve stepped into a life-sized Ladurée macaron box or a beach house in Harbour Island (where Rebecca spends much time). The latest outpost, in Yorkville, is adorned with hand-painted palm trees and scalloped Maghreb archways, inspired by the fabulist fever dream hotel Villa Palladio in Rajasthan. Even the takeaway packaging is pretty: the pastel paper sacs, the pale-pink hue of marabou slippers, are like status bags perched proudly on every other (hot) desk in many a downtown office.

When I speak to the Wolfe sisters over Zoom they are both post-workout, sitting in their respective cars and looking busy and fabulous. I remark on their chic sunglasses and one of the sisters, I’m not sure which, chimes in: “Ohmygod, no! We’re so gross! We just exercised!”

In their partnership, it’s Mandy who is the culinary genius (says Rebecca). Their salads, like their interiors, are colourful, bounteous, Instagram-seducing confections. I order the seasonal Seared Tuna salad, made with purple cabbage, kale, edamame, avocado and togarashi-dusted seared tuna — it’s beautiful and delicious and it runs me nearly $30.

It’s clearly a winning recipe. Mandy’s now claims nine storefronts in Montreal and two in pc28����with two more on the horizon, a couple of bestselling cookbooks and a forthcoming line of housewares called Mandy Maison.

The sisters started slinging roughage in the back of Rebecca’s now husband’s clothing store, Mimi and Coco, in Montreal’s Westmount in 2004. The idea took root after she attended Parsons School of Design in New York in the early aughts and often lunched on meal-sized salads. “You could literally go into any bodega and create your own salad,” she reminisces. The trend had not yet sprouted in Canada. “We set up Ikea fridges, a three-foot counter, and offered a definitive VIP service: we made whatever salad any customer wanted, however they wanted it,” Rebecca says. (They usually wanted The Crunchy Sesame, made with romaine, crunchy noodles, toasted sesame seeds and mandarin slices; it still stars on the Mandy’s menu.) In 2013, the “salad sisters” opened their first proper storefront. “We wanted to provide salad to everyone in the world and we want people to be able to eat it in a stylish way.”

Much has changed in food culture (and otherwise) since those early salad days. But then, every era has its lunch trends and nutritional mores. The late, great Nora Ephron once assessed our cultural evolution from the point of view of salad. Upon recounting an incident with a friend, she wrote: “This was right around the time that arugula was discovered, which was followed by endive, which was followed by radicchio, which was followed by frisée, which was followed by the three M’s-mesclun, mache, and microgreens and that, in a nutshell, is the history of the past forty years from the point of view of lettuce.”

Ephron wrote this in 2006, right before the Age of Kale swept in. (“Kale…,” says Mandy, pausing as if to honour its enduring reign. “We still love kale!” Although her new favourite green is baby gem. “The leaves are firm, tender, they hold up well! Crispy and sweet!”)

The kale craze, buoyed by the adjacent green juice revolution, coincided with the villainization of carbs, the demise of the sandwich (RIP the panini) and the rise of the bowl. Salads were an obvious beneficiary here, but there were also burrito bowls, açai bowls, grain bowls, smoothie bowls, protein bowls … In 2015, noted lover of culinary indulgence Nigella Lawson declared that she would like to eat everything out of a bowl. In 2018, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle opted for “bowl food” for their royal wedding — a choice considered scandalous by British etiquette experts who suggested their rejection of the flat plate’s formality served as an ominous sign.

There is something humble, comforting and intimate about eating from a bowl. It invites abundance and specificity, feeding our collective obsession with add-ons, optimizations and you-do-you individualization. Your bowl, your choice.

At Forest Hill Farmhouse, salad gets the SoCal treatment: minimalist, meticulous and about $20 a bowl

“When we first opened, I loved seeing all the customizations. There was a $52 salad!” says Blair Bitove, who founded Forest Hill Farmhouse in midtown 2022. It now has five locations, having just opened the doors in Liberty Village.

Farmhouse serves a (spring) mix of takes on the classics: Cobbs, Greeks, Caesars, all named after streets in Forest Hill. The Coulson Cobb ($21 with tax) is a riff on the American standard made with feta — “blue cheese is polarizing,” says Bitove — and tossed with a honey truffle vinaigrette instead of the heavier and potentially-alienating buttermilk ranch.

Here, lettuce is never pre-cut or bagged; dressings are made daily in store. “We don’t just offer onions, we offer pickled onions, too,” Bitove says proudly. “We don’t just have broccoli, we offer spicy broccoli! We have grilled eggplant, and watermelon radishes — ingredients that go beyond what you’d find at a typical salad bar.”

If Mandy’s is all whimsical maximalism, Farmhouse is more SoCal minimalism, with sun-splashed white oak walls, wood-panelled ceilings, and flowing greenery. It feels like stumbling into Brentwood Country Mart, somewhere between Jenni Kayne and Goop; if Gwyneth Paltrow’s takeout ghost kitchen in Santa Monica, Goop Kitchen, had a brick-and-mortar shop, I imagine it would look like this.

Bitove has spent a lot of time in the U.S.; she went to the University of Southern California, and says she lived on the salad chain Sweetgreen when she attended law school in Chicago. “When I was living in L.A., I’d go on [American food-delivery service] Postmates and there were so many different options for good, healthy food. But when I moved back to pc28����in 2018, if I typed ‘salad’ into Uber Eats, I’d only get Wendy’s as an option!” says Bitove, laughing. “Also, sometimes I just wanted a good Caesar salad, but I didn’t want to go to a fancy restaurant.”

If the U.S. has long been known, metaphorically, as a cultural melting pot, pc28����has identified as more of a salad bowl in its celebration of distinct and different cultures, tastes and flavours. And for those who haven’t found it easy being green, the ice(berg) age has melted and the city has grown lush with choice.