The salad days are over

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

I’m a bit embarrassed to admit how important a role salad bars have played in my life.

When I was young, our family used to eat out at a restaurant most Friday nights, usually at The View Café because it was close to our log home in Westmond. But, every so often, we would travel to Coeur d’Alene as a family and eat at Bonanza, a western-themed steakhouse and all-you-can-eat buffet with a salad bar that stretched clear across the dining room.

There, under the plastic sneeze guard and packed in urns cradled in ice, was everything one would need to create the ultimate salad. There were several kinds of lettuce, pickled beets, cucumbers, baby carrots, hard-boiled eggs, sweet pickles, sunflower seeds, bacon bits, homemade croutons and a hundred other items that customers could pick and choose from at their leisure.

Courtesy photo.

While it might seem like a giant spread of food that one can feast upon without limit would be an American invention, the salad bar’s origins actually come from the Swedish smörgåsbord — a celebratory meal at which guests help themselves to their choice of a range of hot and cold dishes, laid out for communal grazing. The smörgåsbord more resembles the potluck, but when it was introduced at the 1939 New York World’s Fair at the Swedish Pavilions’s Three Crowns Restaurant, it began the slow transformation into what we now know as the salad bar. 

(Side note: There is some controversy over who actually invented the modern day salad bar. It would take up far too much space to explain it all, so I’ll let this work for now: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .)

Growing up in Sandpoint, I can remember some excellent choices for salad fixings. There was The Garden Restaurant, where I started my first job as a dishwasher and later busboy. The Garden overlooked Sand Creek, just south of where Spud’s is located. 

(Another side note: Somewhere buried in the mud of Sand Creek lie about 100 translucent brown ashtrays, which my fellow busboys and I launched off the deck into the creek like Frisbees because we liked the way they sounded when they hit the water.)

The Garden was a popular spot to enjoy a swanky lunch and dinner, and the lounge had a beautiful grand piano and overstuffed leather chairs, giving it a 1970s lounge vibe that would absolutely kill in the present day.

It was The Garden’s salad bar that I remember most, though. It was ahead of its time, offering homemade dressings, real bacon bits, soups made from scratch, three flavors of fresh-baked breads, and a mix of hot and cold items that I looked forward to for my employee meal every shift.

Sadly, The Garden was razed many years ago and the property became a luxury condo building, because, well, that’s what we do here now.

The Hydra Steakhouse had a famous salad bar — and among the last ones standing, until its discontinuation in the not-too-distant past. One pro tip was to order a pasta entree, or something that would keep as leftovers, and make a trip to the salad bar while dining in. Then, take your entree home in a doggie bag and stretch one meal into two.

The only salad bar left in Sandpoint that I know of is at Winter Ridge Natural Foods, where you pay by the weight. It doesn’t offer a smörgåsbord of options like those of yesteryear, but, like fat-free dressing, it’s better than nothing. 

The closest restaurant to Sandpoint that still features a salad bar is the Springs Restaurant inside the Kootenai River Inn and Casino located in Bonners Ferry. From 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day, you pay only $7.99 for a cup of soup and one trip to the salad bar, down from the dinner price of $12 for a single trip or $15 for all you can eat. 

Many say that the work-from-home trend quickened the salad bar’s demise. Others claim it was because of growing health concerns or rising food costs. All of that aside, salad bars have joined the growing list of the parts of American life that existed pre-COVID and are now quietly dying out.

Once, they were everywhere — and sure, you can still find them if you look hard enough — but it’s clear that the salad days are over.