Dining Out: Five Good Ass Salads In London

Or, "it's still really hot."

Something about me is that I’m a big salad guy. Love salads, love all the components of salads. One of my favourite snacks right now is literally just: a little gem lettuce*. I’m a salad head, so sue me. And of course in the hot weather this amps up tenfold – my dinners at the minute basically just consist of chicken or tinned fish, whatever veg I can be arsed to chop and scrape into in a massive bowl, plus a minimum of three different hot sauces (see below) – so it felt only right to devote this paid subscribers post to places where you can get great salad, because I love you and I want to be helpful during these sweaty and trying times.

An example of the aforementioned dinner salads ^

Some of the salads here are standards – there’s a tabbouleh and a Greek salad, for example – and some are more of the “genuinely big and filling work lunch” school, but they are all excellent and they will all make you actually want to eat something other than a Solero in this mad (but, for me at least, very welcome) heat.

Bayroot

When I’m hungover I occasionally crave burger and nugs because I am but a mere mortal, but more commonly what I want is zest and flavour and something to wake up the inside of my mouth – which invariably, sorry, tastes like something has died inside it on these occasions. And so my hangover go-to order is usually a falafel wrap with all the trimmings, star among these being the largest possible serving of tabbouleh.

I have been resurrected by the specific tabbouleh from Bay Root on the Walworth Road a number of times. Here, they omit the sometimes-included bulgur wheat, and just give it to you straight up: shitloads of parsley, tomato, onion, with lemon and olive oil. It positively zings around your gob, it’s great with Bay Root’s crumbly, porous falafel, and it is so legitimately mouth-tingling (in a good way) that on many occasions I’ve just eaten it with a spoon by itself.