Expensive salad bowls are stupid
Somewhere in the City of London there is a queue of people in gilets and lanyards willing to wait 45 minutes for a salad. If you were mistrustful of the bankers (and the bonuses) in the wake of 2008, then this should be the death knell. It is one thing to gamble recklessly the British economy on dodgy US mortgages, triggering a credit crunch, forcing bailouts, spiking unemployment, doubling public debt and unmooring the electorate from its faith in institutions for generations. But 45 minutes for some iceberg lettuce and rice in a box? Please.
I am not in the City very often – sorry, I am just too damn whimsical for all this talk of leveraged buyouts and Ebitda. And something about Bank scrambles my sense of direction – like I have been put through a washing machine spin cycle, and then asked to tell my left from my right. The Thames could be behind me, miles ahead, or 300 metres to my left. I guess we will never know. I kept taking wrong turns down narrow, Jack the Rippery alleyways, which made my destination almost impossible to find. Alas, I found it: the Salad Project. Or “SP” if you’re casual like that.
“Who said salad can’t be a lifestyle?” is the tagline of this fast casual City lunch spot. (To which I am minded to reply, “Erm, no one probably?”) I scrolled through the website – it was something to do while I waited nearly an hour in the aseptic room, with its mock-surgical furnishing and medicinally blue tiles. “The Salad Project is your next bad habit, except it’s really good.” Now, what on Earth is that supposed to mean? You know someone was paid to write that! Scroll, scroll, scroll – “At the Salad Project, we don’t just make salad. We make it better – again and again.” Have I just been lobotomised?
Never mind. I am sure the food is better than the copywriting. It is not called the Witty and Insightful Prose Project, after all. The Salad Project is catering to a new generation of City worker: the health-conscious puritans that now populate the M&A departments; the proteinniks; the fibre-conscious. A pair behind me were discussing the menu items and the attendant nutritional information: “It looks like the protein quantities have changed,” one said with forceful, tremendous banality. I know, or perhaps it is more honest to say that I have learned, that it is rude to call a stranger boring to their face, so I bit my tongue, allowed myself a withering look, and chalked it up as an instructive detail.
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Elsewhere in the queue I spotted a mean woman in a Louis Vuitton scarf; a man who could have been on day release from Berlaymont, like he is called Jean-Claude von der Weber or something like that; mid-tier managers in loafers and their secretaries in uninspiring blazers. Everyone was very good-looking (all that fibre!), and no one appeared to have the ravaged countenance and bloated guts once associated with City commodities traders. Instead, I suspected most had Strava on their phone and semi-serious opinions about chickpeas.
It was a busy operation: I counted at least 15 staff members, frantically composing salads to order for the endless stream of solicitors, compliance managers and securities analysts. And who knows how many more staff were toiling away down in the salt mine? Because I would describe the sodium levels in my Caesar salad as profligate, which made it rather hard to finish. I like salty food and would usually allow some latitude here – if “SP” didn’t get so high and mighty about its health properties. By my calculations, my salad was about as healthy as three cigarettes, and 78 per cent less delicious. So do the maths on that one, dorks.
But hey, maybe it’s good for the economy that the four-hour, two-bottle lunches of Nigel Farage’s imagination have gone out of fashion – even if what’s replaced it is boxes of leaves as big as your head. And as I wandered back to the comforting squalor of Smithfield, I was struck by how nice they have it down here: an exclave of Fortnum & Mason, a Tiffany jewellers, an Omega, a huge mounted statue of the Duke of Wellington. Yes, very nice. Dull, sure, but fine. And clean. Almost like if salad were a lifestyle.
[Further reading: Meet the Angry Young Women]
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