When Matthew Corrin opened his Toronto lunch spot Lettuce Eatery in January, he had done his research.
He knew, for instance, about the AC Nielsen report that vegetables are the most purchased product in Canada next to meat -- to the tune of $2.4-billion a year. According to Statistics Canada, 36 per cent of Canadians eat more than the recommended five to 10 servings a day of fruits and veggies.
"I saw a niche in the financial district," he says. He was a big fan of the New York-style upscale salad bar, which elevates leafy greens to a star role, instead of as a mere vehicle for Thousand Island dressing and monster croutons.
But even he is surprised at the success of the subterranean financial district spot. He won't share numbers, but new Lettuce Eateries will be cropping up above ground soon.
"Greens are in. We make as many salads as we can in a day," he says, adding that he's going through eight cases of romaine and 60 pounds of spinach a day, sourced from St. Lawrence Market.
Such is the power of lettuce. Unlike poor little vegetarian Lisa Simpson who had to endure her family singing, "You don't make friends with salad," while dancing in a conga line, Corrin is racing to keep up with all his new friends. He's doubled his staff. And won the Cadillac Fairview 2005 Arc Award for Achievement in new Retail Concepts in Canada -- against such big chains as H&M and Hero Burgers.
But it's more than simply the no-carb craze that has customers -- men and women, since "salad isn't just for girls any more" -- picking romaine, mesclun, iceberg and/or spinach, then adding their choice of 80 toppings from beets to asparagus to smoked turkey. (For now, he's taken the last-place green, arugula, off the menu.) There's no doubt that as a culture we are more greens-literate than we used to be. That California creation, the mesclun mix of baby greens credited to Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters, is a mainstream staple. And where a head of romaine was once seen as exotic, you can routinely find endive, arugula, frisée and radicchio at your local grocery store.
The Vietnamese-style salad wrap is gaining on the rolled tortilla as the hot "sandwich." The South Beach Diet, for one, includes a recipe for a turkey roll-up using Boston lettuce instead of bread.
Then there's the fast-food fatigue among people who want to eat marginally better (even if Corrin is sure to stock loads of cheeses, bacon bits and other non-diet goodies). And high-end restos have been doing decadent things with delicate greens for some time: One of the most popular dishes at Toronto's Brant House is French fries on baby greens.
"I have guys tell me that they go home to their wives and say, 'I had a salad today,' when it happened to have had beef tenderloin, grilled onions and red potatoes there too," Corrin says, describing his Steakhouse Salad.
And like gyms, Corrin does brisk business on Mondays. One regular has boasted that he has lost 20 pounds eating Corrin's salads -- and now posts the menu on his fridge for inspiration.
The latest player is mâche, the subject of a New Yorker piece last fall called Salad Days: How A Lowly Leaf Became a High-end Delicacy. The newly-available-in-North-America green, also known as lamb's lettuce or corn salad, has a nutty flavour and is now sold bagged alongside the organic baby spinach and the mesclun mix.
Mike Long, the Mississauga-based director of produce for the Toronto chain Longo's, says sales for romaine and iceberg are down, but sales of the whole lettuce category are up, thanks to mâche in particular and the trend to bagged salads.
"Ten years ago, they were non-profitable. We've seen a lift in the last two or three years -- and it hasn't peaked," he says.
Lettuce is so hot there's even politics. "When I think of what mesclun mix has turned into, it just makes me sad," Waters is quoted as saying in The New Yorker piece, which traces the evolution of designer greens from a local, organic obsession to an agribusiness. "To think that someone can put that name on a bag of salad from God knows where. . . . It's pretty alarming."
For better or worse, Jeff Biddle, the Chicago-based produce co-ordinator for Whole Foods Markets, agrees that packaged lettuces and "living" lettuces (usually Boston or butter lettuces, with their roots) are indeed the news right now, taking the number of leafy choices available into double digits. "It makes it easier for the retailer to experiment with different varieties."
He's fond of one grower outside St. Louis who groups four greens, including mustard greens and butter lettuce, in a living-lettuce container for an instant restaurant-level gourmet mix. "Part of me thinks restaurants have helped drive that variation. People see it in a restaurant and want to be able to do it at home."
Celebrity chef Daniel Boulud is a big promoter of mâche, which he grew up eating wild in his native France. "The discovery people are making about lettuces is that there are varieties for every range of the palate," he writes in an e-mail. "Each one lends itself to a distinctively different accompaniment of dressing, seasoning and garnish."
For both retailers and restaurateurs, the, er, lettuce is always greener on the other side, so everyone's jumping into the salad bowl. Like many others, the Holiday Inn on King Street in Toronto has revived the salad bar with its new Great Salad Express in its Canadian Bar and Grill, offering four choices of greens. And fast-food chains from McDonalds to Wendy's are updating their salad offerings.
In Britain, the trend is to "living salads," which are pots of mixed greens meant to be installed on the windowsill, much like herbs. And people like the California Walnut Commission are getting in on the action promoting their foods as salad-friendly ingredients. Biddle says to expect more of this in North America, where growers are using hothouses to keep up with demand. Canada, for example, is the major supplier of roots-on butter lettuces to the Whole Foods stores in the Midwestern United States.
As for gardeners, lettuce may soon gain the kind of following that heritage tomato folks give their coveted seeds. A new wave of chic gardening books connects the growing of gourmet lettuces to the table. In The Gourmet Gardener, author Bob Flowerdew (yes, it's his real name) writes that he "became consumed by gardening simply searching for top-quality fare for my table."
When it comes to leafy greens, "lettuces are not difficult to grow well yet are often poorly grown." He says this as someone who has obviously tasted too many lettuces that are long in the tooth and on their way to seed. So he outlines growing mâche, rocket (arugula), chicory, endive, purslane, watercress and a funky one called shungiko, an edible chrysanthemum and "an essential ingredient of Chinese chop suey greens."
It appears we even want to smell like lettuce. The current issue of shopping mag Lucky pegs lettuce as the new scent du jour, saying it "emits a soothing, vaguely earthy, even a little aquatic scent." There's Burt's Bees' Wild Lettuce Complexion Soap for dry skin and a Roger & Gallet Lettuce bath and shower gel.
Amid all this trendiness, though, a parallel movement is afoot. Restaurants are serving a crisp wedge of good old iceberg lettuce with strong dressings like blue cheese. And as any farm-raised Canadian will tell you, there's nothing quite like a slice of juicy head lettuce fresh from the garden between two slices of bread. Summer in a sandwich.