SALAD DAYS
From Terminal Markets To Rainbow Pasta: Tracking The Source of Korean Salad Bars in New York City
BY RICK MITCHELL
ABOUT 15 YEARS AGO, JAMES CHUNG got an idea that illuminated his brain like incandescent dollar signs. He installed stainless-steel trays loaded with hot and cold ethnic foods into his new deli at 31st St. and Park Avenue, put in a dining area with tables topped with red-and-white checkered tablecloths, then named the place Charlies Salad Bar. Charlies, say the Chungs, was New York's first Korean salad bar.
The customers that swarmed into Charlies piled their plastic trays with greens and Chung's cash register with greenbacks. With three Korean and three Latino cooks contributing their own specialties, Charlies was making big bucks until about the time Chung sold out to his brother-in-law six years ago and left the city. By then, the number of salad bars had exploded and competition had moved in across the street. The recession took another big chunk of business. But even though Charlies' market share has plunged, Chung's salad legacy, the buffet lunch sold by the pound, is now a New York tradition.
According to the New York Department of Consumer Affairs, every day New Yorkers go into the city's 700 salad bars and buy 840,000 salads, spending about $2 million at prices that range from $3.29 a pound on up. Assuming each salad weighs an average of three-quarters of a pound, that's 630,000 pounds of assorted fruits, vegetables and ethnic foods ladled out daily.
If you've been into the city's salad bars, you've probably noticed that almost all are run by Korean families. Most are in Manhattan, in high pedestrian-traffic areas where salad meisters can lay out a spread of perishable foods and be sure it will sell before spoiling. But where does all that stuff come from?
Most salad bars procure their ingredients from the same sources: fresh produce and meats from the New York City Terminal Market at Hunts Point in the Bronx, seafood from independents, and grocery items and condiments form wholesale distributors.
But what's created out of those raw makings depends on who's cooking and for whom. In salad bars on the tony Upper East Side and near Lincoln Center, you find a rainbow of colorful pasta salads and such delicacies as marinated hearts of palm; around Columbia University, tofu dishes, bean sprouts and lentil soup abound. Near Penn Station, there are steaming trays of pungent meat loaf with cabbage, deep-fried chicken nuggets with sweet and sour sauce and glistening fried plantains.
Lee Sang Yong owns the Honeycomb Deli Grocery on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The salad bar is the centerpiece of the store and for good reason: it brings in 25-30 percent of the business. He needs to raise the $3.49 a pound he charges, but the competition has him hog tied.
Every morning at 2 a.m., he drives his graffiti-sprayed truck to Hunts Point. His wife and sister-in-law start cooking at 8 a.m. in the Honeycomb's basement-kitchen, where over-brimming tubs of raw chicken clutter the floor. The recipe for barbecued chicken, the number-one seller of their 80 dishes -- open a gallon can of barbecue sauce and slosh it on.
The popular stir-fried Chinese dishes are doused with sesame oil and garlic to "Koreanize" them, says Lee. He once hired a Chinese woman to do the cooking. She used up a 50-pound bag of MSG in two weeks. "We decided to cook the food ourselves," he says, grinning.
Lee cheerfully admits that many of his dishes -- like three-bean salad and the stuffed vine leaves with rice, even egg rolls, come pre-made from distributors. He'll even show you the cans. But other salad bar owners insist, some hotly, that virtually everything they sell is made fresh on the premises.
Ironically enough, Korean salad bars offer little Korean food, usually just kim-pop, which is rice, spices and vegetables rolled in sheets of laver (sea lettuce). "It's the smell -- too strong," says Lee. "When Americans smell Korean food [which usually reeks of garlic] they hold their noses."
Like their kin, the green grocer, salad bars have been experiencing the fruit-fly effect since 1988 and are no longer assured profit makers, says Myong Y. Juch, president of the Korean-American Grocer's Association.
Mrs. Chung Young Soo, one of Charlies' new owners, speaks wistfully about the boom years. "Six years ago, Charlies was bringing in $6,000 to $7,000 a day, some days even $10,000, but not any more. Now it manages only $2,500 to $3,000." Juch (pronounced "Joo") says more lean years are ahead, and many businesses won't survive.
Charlies' sorry luck notwithstanding, salad bars aren't likely to disappear. Rather, the best ones will continue to bring New Yorkers the variety of fresh foods they've come to expect to have waiting for them every day about lunch hour. Because New York knows a good deal when it eats it.
