Great Steakhouse Salad Recipes from Wedge and Caesar to Cobb and Tomato-Onion

There are people for whom a steakhouse visit is a regular occurrence, and to them I say, “Congratulations on your expense account and/or your six-figure job.” For the rest of us palookas, a steak dinner is an occasion, and I start daydreaming about the menu the second the reservation is locked in. The steak itself is an audible that I call once I hear the night’s specials (though it’s generally a petite filet, black and blue, and I don’t mess with sauce). Sides are the consensus of the table, but, if asked, I’ll opt for creamed spinach, mushrooms, and whatever potato is the crispiest. 

Salads, though? I’m not compromising. And I’m only sharing if I’m getting half of what you ordered, because knockout steakhouse salads are why I’m sitting there in the first place. 

I threw my 40th birthday party at The Golden Steer in Las Vegas, in large part because I wanted my loved ones to experience one of the greatest shows in Sin City: Venko, a tuxedoed man who has crafted over 300,000 tableside Caesar salads in his 36-year tenure at the restaurant, which opened in 1958. There’s plenty of showmanship dressing up his whole performance — theatrical pepper grinding, yukking it up — but it’s not all just shadowboxing. There’s a real art to locking romaine, anchovies, Parmesan, croutons, egg yolk, and other classic elements together in a one-two punch of textural bliss and pungent flavors that forms a salad — A SALAD! — worthy of dragging my friends across the country and, I should add, off the Strip. 

Closer to home in New York City, the nearly 140-year-old Keens Steakhouse offers entrée-size salads only on its lunch menu, and for that I am grateful. If they were available at dinner, I’d feel a little bashful munching on a Cobb while my dining companions were tucking into their mutton chops, but I’d have to. There’s no way I’d pass up their signature mélange of smoked chicken, shrimp, and steak with cherry tomatoes, hard-cooked eggs, avocado, blue cheese … and, yeah, there’s probably some lettuce in there somewhere. There’s also not a chance I’d just take a few dainty bites so I could move on to a steak and also save room for Keens’ inevitable coffee cantata dessert at the end of the meal. This Cobb is the heavyweight champ of midtown Manhattan’s midday.

Raw onions and I generally aren’t spotted canoodling in public (that 40th birthday was a while ago, and kids — enjoy your youth and beauty), but if we do fraternize, it’s at a fluorescently lit table at Peter Luger, the legendarily gruff steakhouse that opened across the East River just two years after Keens. Thick slices of beefsteak tomato and Vidalia onion doused in Luger’s signature horseradish-spiced steak sauce might sound like a head-scratcher until you taste them going mano a mano with a thickly marbled, dry-aged porterhouse. Suddenly, you’ll feel cranky at the prospect of any steak not served alongside this combo.

These are each contenders for the title of greatest steakhouse salad of all time. But still, for my money, the wedge has the edge. Since 1956, it’s been a bare-knuckle brawl for reservations at Bern’s Steak House in Tampa, Florida, due in no small part to its rendition of the classic iceberg salad. Double-dressed with a vinaigrette and blue cheese, it’s topped with diced tomatoes, bacon, thinly sliced scallions, and a slab of Gorgonzola dolce, so every last bite of lettuce is bathed in outrageous amounts of flavor.

An interstate steakhouse crawl isn’t in the cards for me in the near future, but luckily, the F&W Test Kitchen is in my corner. They’ve taken inspiration from these restaurants’ iconic executions and beefed up the best parts to create the ultimate versions for us to knock out at home.