Salads should always be served on plates large enough to gracefully accommodate the assembled ingredients. 

        I remember poking nervously at a delicious salad in the Drake Hotel in Chicago because the plate was so tiny the feet of the lettuce leaves, so to speak, were dangling over the edge, creating on the diner’s part a certain Sisyphean frustration while the traffic sloshed by on Upper Michigan Ave.  Of course that was thirty years ago, these days margins are generally treated with respect, the great gods of trend-setting have shot us into the era of plates (or multi-purpose bowls for that matter, and usually large ones) as painter’s canvas. 

        The chances are now exceedingly good your salad, stew or crisp will be counterpointed with micro-acres of “negative space” worthy of one of  57th Street’s best: for every forest of food there will be a circling meadow of s-p-a-c-e to keep the gustatory attraction du jour in focus.  Or, to change the image, there’ll be room for tasty rubble tumbling from a nervous Vesuvius of an “architectural” plat du jour deconstructing under your fork: I’m reminded of a recently enjoyed timbale of fresh anchovies that unrolled upon contact with cutlery as if they were descending a Guggenheim Museum ramp. 

        And this principle of centripetal styling may easily be applied at home where it’s so much fun to play Restaurant, the grownup equivalent of the classic lemonade stand or lining up Mom’s cans of tuna and Campbell’s soup as we did at the age of six and charging for them too.

        . . . I must also call your attention to Cousin Tom’s “Anything Goes” Citrus Vinaigrette, excellent with a chef’s, fruit or Périgourdine salad, which seemed tailor-made for a patio lunch “au bord d’un lagoon” at Newport Beach with power boats all about but should be exportable to less tropical venues: combine  1) olive oil,  2) a mix of balsamic, raspberry and red wine vinegars,  3) grapefruit juice, a little sugar and a good heap of Dijon mustard.

Play with this one . . .

        AND:  lately I’ve been adding a short teaspoon of “Asian tamarind sauce” to olive oil/red wine vinegar dressings — plus baby helpings of oregano and ginger.  Makes them throb!  A charmoula-type dressing is interesting too: olive oil, lemon, garlic, parsley, and almost enough paprika to immobilize a Hungarian.

        It’s common, of course, for people to fall in love “across a crowded room.” I fell in love with a hotel looking out a train window: passing through Brive-la-Gaillarde, that pleasant market town between Limoges and Cahors, I was drawn, across the way, to a Late Victorian hotel facing the station, four or five stories, a bit ornate, friendly looking and solid in more than the pure engineering sense.  I made a note of it, as the telephone informationist recommends when giving you a number.  And eight years later, one 10 p.m., I came to know the Grand Hotel Terminus’ birdcage elevator, its varnished halls, creaking armoires, bathtubs long as a yacht if not as sleek; and there was the resident cat to join us for breakfast.  Several visits indicated that the Terminus had few clients, and the formal dining room, once proud I’m sure, stood empty at the lunch and dinner hours.

        Soon the Michelin guide, requiring gleamier, less Titanical tubs, dropped the Terminus as if it were some eccentric aunt not welcome in the parlor.  But the hotel continued to answer my requests for a room, assuring us the “calme” we enjoyed in room 16 which overlooked the garden and was assigned to us “comme d’habitude.” One year the dining room even echoed to a meeting of hearty locals, Rotary members perhaps; they lunched on good roast veal because the aroma of its juices shot up to our little balcony where we were picnicking on a robust Cantal from the nearest fromagerie (just down a bucolic lane) and looking off to Auvergne, or its environs, in the East.  It’s ten years now since we included Brive in an itinerary, and I pray that the Terminus with its lovable anachronisms and pianissimo corridors and Monsieur le Chat and the voice of the station announcer across the way has not been, well, terminated.  Who cares about governments falling?

        Let’s see, is that number 011-33-5-55-74-21-14?