Bill Addison

The line for a salad at Eatzi's Market and Bakery in Oak Lawn inches along slowly, as usual. It's 1 p.m. on a Thursday, but I've been here earlier in the day, later in the day, earlier in the week, the middle of Saturday afternoons, late Sunday evenings: There's always at least a short line for salad.

Eatzi's organizational system is not at fault. It's just the natural pace of the process. For each customer, a staffer manning the salad line retrieves a stainless steel bowl and gestures toward the bins behind him. Customers choose from spinach, pale iceberg lettuce, romaine cut into neat rectangles or a fluffy, starchy mix of mesclun greens.

The same staffer lobs in a customer's requested toppings, asking, "What next? What next?" in rapid fire until all the choices are made. Then the bowl is passed off to the next employee, who chucks in more additions from his or her end of the table, consults with the customer about dressing options, tumbles the ingredients together with tongs, boxes it in a plastic container and then grabs the next waiting bowl of half-finished salad.

Evans Caglage / DMN

Elis Droubi, senior manager, prepares a custom salad at Eatzi's.

People stand impatiently in the queue, shifting their weight and trying not to gape at the selection of triple-cream cheeses diabolically placed next to the salad area. I wait more stoically than most: I have come to relish the people-watching in this scenario, and I'm also one of the people who eventually muck up the works.

A few observations: Folks who don't want to face the fact that they're ordering a salad prefer Eatzi's sweet-and-sour dressing, which eclipses just about any edible substance it touches with its Chinese-American restaurant tang. College-age individuals seem to like egg in their salads (no idea why). Some stereotypes apply: Country club types tend to prefer grilled chicken Caesars. Exceedingly thin women ask for lots of cucumber slices and fat-free vinaigrette.

The salad bowl in America has become a symbol of (and vessel for) many of our cultural body issues. Behind the request for a salad is often a thought such as, "I need to stick to my diet" or "I'm getting fat." Certainly, some days we simply want food that sits lightly in our stomachs, particularly in the summer. But psychological implications in the vein of "you are what you eat" seem to lurk closer to the surface in association with salads.

And if that's the case, I'm not sure if I like what I see in myself: I'm High Maintenance Salad Guy.

The Eatzi's salad is my most frequent sustenance for the few meals a week that I'm off-duty as a restaurant critic. I discovered a few months back that early in the day, and sometimes midafternoon or early evening, Eatzi's lettuce bin is stocked with a small supply of three additional lettuces: whole heads of bibb, radicchio and endive. Score! Bibb (also known as Boston or butter) leaves have the silkiest texture, and radicchio and endive add bitter spunk to the medley.

So my order usually goes something like this:

"Can I have bibb and radicchio and endive, please?"

Evans Caglage / DMN

The finished Eatzi's salad

The staffer glances over his shoulder, sighs to himself and gathers the lettuces. He must chop each of these individually. The employee next to him finishes up the salad she's been working on and stacks a few dirty bowls. The woman right behind me looks questioningly at her friend.

"What else?"

"Um, bacon and shrimp and grilled chicken, please. That's all from this side."

The staffer cuts a chicken breast into bite-size pieces and then happily moves me along.

"What kind of dressing?" asks the second-line salad maker.

"Oh, just a few more toppings first, please. Can I have carrots and blue cheese? And some avocado?"

She fishes through a basket full of (one hopes) ripe avocados, cuts one in half, slices the flesh and plops it in the bowl.

"And roasted red peppers?"

The peppers are stocked on the sandwich station next to the salad post. These must be chopped by hand as well. The woman next to me is now openly glaring. I don't blame her.

"What else?"

"Balsamic vinaigrette, please? Not too much!"

The staffer takes the tongs, flipping and flopping until every bit of lettuce is coated with dressing. This is the critical step and the reason I don't go in for grocery store salad bars. I want that dressing integrated.

I half expect this poor soul to bludgeon me with the final product, but my salad is always handed to me politely. I nod gratefully and scamper away.

(And, yes, I do realize that the above concoction, the same I request without variation, is sodden with fat. Personally, it's the illusion of healthfulness I'm after with salads.)

Ahna Hubnik / DMN

A Snappy Salads' creation

Other eateries around the city that compose salads on the spot don't allow me to be quite so dictatorial. I haven't spotted any stash of select lettuces at Dallas City Market, so I ask for a mix of romaine and field greens. The roasted red peppers are already sliced and ready to go. You get only a quarter of an avocado here for the same price you pay for a half at Eatzi's, but the flesh is carved into appealing large chunks.

One oddity that Dallas City Market offers as a topping is dolmas, the rice-stuffed grape leaves. Sometimes they've been fresher than others, but when I'm chomping through greens and slices of jicama and carrots, it's a jolting pleasure to bite into an herbaceous, taut grape leaf with its squishy, spiced filling.

Like a cad, I'll admit that my loyalty to Eatzi's is geography-based. When I'm willing to drive for a leafy mélange, I cast my lot with Snappy Salads. This place revels in the details of new millennial salad composition: hormone-free grilled chicken, jumbo shrimp, biodegradable disposable utensils. No bibb, but a downy combo of red and green leaf lettuce comes in a close second. If I'm feeling retro, they have canned mandarin orange segments.

With all but the purest, hand-harvested salads, though, the enjoyment factor really comes down to the dressing, doesn't it? Snappy brings it: My preference is half chipotle ranch, half roasted red pepper vinaigrette. The ranch packs a no-joke slap of spice, and the roasted red pepper has a sultry, smoky undertone. All salads could use a little sultry.

Greenz, with three locations around the metro area, deals primarily in salads, but here's the kicker: You have to choose from one of the 14 variations of vegetarian or meaty compositions available. Would they be flexible and let me have my way?

Before my visit to the Uptown branch, I check out the Greenz Web site and compile a list of ingredients to request. Then I waltz into the store and up to the cash register.

"Can I create my own salad?"

"Sure, you can," says the smiling man behind the counter. "But it's easier if you pick one of the salad choices that most appeal to you and then subtract and add if you please."

Cool. I choose the Chipotle Chicken salad and then rattle off my usual caloric hodgepodge of substitutions.

Natalie Caudill / DMN

Greenz's Chipotle Chicken salad

A few minutes later, the same fellow brings out my salad.

"Dude, that does look like a good salad," he says as he sets down my plate.

And just as I'm about to smugly stuff my mouth with the first self-designed forkful, another staffer delivers a salad to the woman sitting next to me.

It's the Mediterranean, an elegant-looking collage of finely chopped romaine with diced tomato, cucumber, red onions, olives and feta molded into a precise circle, bound with tzatziki (yogurt) dressing and artfully decked out with triangular pita crisps.

"How is that?" I ask the woman after a moment.

"Delicious," she responds, nodding. "It's my favorite thing here."

Huh. Maybe the next time I go to Greenz, I'll leave my High Maintenance Salad Guy persona behind.

EATZI'S MARKET AND BAKERY 3403 Oak Lawn Ave. 214-526-1515. www.eatzis.catertrax.com.

DALLAS CITY MARKET 5600 W. Lovers Lane (Pavillion Shopping Center). 214-350-8646. www.dallascitymarket.com.

SNAPPY SALADS 5915 Forest Lane. 972-991-7627. Also at NorthPark Center, Central Expressway at Northwest Highway. 214-368-7627. www.snappysalads.com.

GREENZ 2808 McKinney Ave. 214-720-7788. (And other locations.) www.greenzsalads.com.