Sometimes I Just Want a Basic Bloody Mary or Caesar Salad

The wheel is thought to have been invented about 6,000 years ago in Lower Mesopotamia, probably by someone who was really tired of dragging things. At some point thereafter, humankind came up with the saying “We don’t need to recreate the wheel,” because the wheel is a pretty solid invention. The food world has some pretty solid dishes too, yet so many people want to recreate them that it’s sometimes hard to remember what it was supposed to be in the first place. While creativity is a necessity when crafting a future-forward menu, some things are good just the way they are and don’t need a new interpretation. 

A staple on any brunch menu is the classic Bloody Mary. It’s a cocktail made with vodka, but when it’s mixed with tomato juice it becomes something that’s perfectly acceptable to drink at 10:30 in the morning. In recent years, restaurants seem to be creating over-the-top versions of this standard brunch fare. Instead of a simple celery stalk there’s an entire farmer’s market crammed into the highball glass with asparagus, pickled okra, or green beans. 

It was cute when someone first used a single shrimp as a garnish, but it evolved into two shrimp and then three and then an entire lobster tail ends up clinging to the glass. Someone came up with the idea to add a piece of bacon to a Bloody Mary which was fine, but the next thing you knew it’s skewered with a bacon double cheeseburger precariously perched on the glass making it top heavy. It also goes from being a reasonably priced drink to have with your omelet to a budget-busting, calorie-crushing cocktail that takes the place of breakfast altogether. The Bloody Mary does not need to be reinvented and if a restaurant does decide to add an everything bagel with lox to it, hopefully the classic one is still available. 

I once went to a raw vegan restaurant that my friend wanted me to try. “You’ll never know it’s raw vegan, “ she told me. “They are so creative!” 

I only agreed to go because she offered to pay for it and I ordered the lasagna, wondering how they could possibly make a lasagna without pasta, cheese or, you know, cooking. It arrived to the table looking nothing like any lasagna I had ever seen. It was layers of “zucchini and squash noodles” with cashew cheese and a tomato puree. It was also colder than the icy stare I gave my friend when the server placed it in front of me.  

Rather than reinventing lasagna, they should have just given it a new name and let lasagna live its perfect life. It tasted nothing like lasagna and it should have been called Cold Layered Vegetable Salad with Nuts and Nutritional Yeast. Adding mushrooms and sausage to lasagna, sure, but leaving out the pasta and the cheese is a felony. 

And enough with the deconstructed anything. If a menu says something is deconstructed, it makes me think it just wasn’t finished in the kitchen. A Caesar salad should arrive in a bowl, fully dressed with croutons, anchovies, and a protein of choice if desired. Please do not bring me a Caesar salad with all the ingredients artfully placed in trays and serving bowls for me to assemble. I didn’t want to assemble my Kungsfors bar cart from Ikea and I don’t want to assemble my Caesar salad from a restaurant. Swapping out kale for the romaine is a fine enough “twist on the classic,” but if I need instructions on how to put it together before I eat it, it’s gone too far.

Call me simple, call me jaded, but don’t call a pile of cold vegetables “lasagna.” Not all things need to be reinvented.