I can’t be the only person in South Africa who is sick of ordering a salad (especially Greek salad) at a restaurant or on Uber Eats, only to find that it comes with practically a whole head of lettuce. Even if you have the patience to remove every single cruchy leaf, you’re left with basically nothing.

I can’t be the only one!

I’ve been focusing on my health lately, and after doing some research, I found that eating salads before I eat protein and starches aids in my digestion. So, I have been making a concerted effort to eat more salads and increase my fibre intake. When dining out, I have started to make better health choices for myself, and the scale and my waistline agree. But herein lies my dilemma. I travelled to England and France last month, and every salad I bought had little to no lettuce. Don’t get me wrong: I love a good lettuce wrap, and if I order a Caesar salad, I want to see nothing but lettuce (in that yummy sauce). It then led me down a rabbit hole in finding out the origin of certain salads. Let’s start with the Greek salad: It typically has peppers, cucumber, olives, tomato and feta in it. Greek salad, or horiatiki, originated in the late 19th to early 20th century as a rustic village dish in Greece, combining fresh local produce like tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, and olives. The addition of feta cheese and olive oil gave it the signature taste that became popular internationally in the 1960s with the rise of Greek tourism.

In Greece, a horiatiki (village) salad has no lettuce at all, only tomato, cucumber, onion, olives, and feta. Lettuce-based salads are more of an American and Western European adaptation, which spread globally and influenced how “Greek salad” is served in restaurants.

In South Africa, many restaurants bulk it up with lettuce because it’s cheap, fills the plate, and matches the Westernised idea of what a salad “should” look like, even though it strays from the original recipe.

I must say that I am not a fan of the South African versions, and we should get the choice of the non-lettuce version.

But it led me to understand that maybe salads migrate, then mutate. The tabbouleh outside the Levant gets loaded with couscous instead of herbs, and Caesar salads in some countries swap anchovies for chicken strips. These are not necessarily bad changes, and made me a little sad for hating on my own country’s adaptation of the Greek salad. I still don’t agree, but I do see the need to style it up according to what people want.

That being said, I want to create a list of restaurants that make the “real” non-lettuce Greek salad. Off the top of my mind, I know:

– Ocean Basket (although they have giant tomatoes in the salad) has a traditional Greek Salad.
– Luigi’s Pizzeria: They state on the Uber Eats platform- “No lettuce” next to their listing of Greek salad.

That’s basically it! I haven’t gone that far into my health journey, but I look forward to updating this list.