Can You Take Too Much Salad from the Salad Bar?

Photo Credit: Investvine

A local sandwich shop near my home offers a salad bar to go. For roughly $8 you receive a large plastic container and a small cup, which you can use to fill and carry home.

The deli offers salads on their menu for roughly the same cost, which pale in comparison to how much you could fit on a typical plate. They add in stuff like tuna or chicken salad, but the amount of food is probably half what you could pile in at the salad bar. On my very first visit I discovered that the salad bar was a much better deal than ordering off the menu.

What’s interesting about this place is that unlike a lot of other salad bars you don’t have to weigh your food after you fill the box, so in essence you can pack it as tightly as you like. In theory you could fill it with nothing but hard boiled eggs or baby beets. I myself focus on the veggies, eggs, nuts and sunflower seeds and leave very little room for other things like lettuce.

It’s not labeled as all you can eat and if you eat in the restaurant you only receive one plate, so I’m assuming that the restaurant does not want you to return for seconds. The box is four times the depth of a plate, so you can easily cram about four times as much stuff in there.

As I was filling the box I began to wonder just how much food I could fit inside. As I pondered cramming food inside of it I also wondered if it’s possible to take too much salad from the salad bar.

So here’s a question for you. If the restaurant gives you a large box and doesn’t ask you to weigh the contents of that box is it okay to fill it to it’s maximum capacity? Do you think it’s possible to take too much salad from the salad bar? If you have thoughts about this definitely leave me a comment below.

Oh and as for the picture at the top of this post. That is from a salad tower that was created at a Pizza Hut in China. Apparently Pizza Huts in China only offered one plate to each patron. In an effort to make the most of their trips to the salad bar customers began creating salad towers that could fit as much food as possible on that one little plate. Google Pizza Hut salad towers and you’ll find all sorts of crazy pictures for it.