Branson and the Dinner Salad

Brittany and I spent Friday night and Saturday night in Branson. Yeah, we're the life of the party. Don't bother asking what shows we saw. We spent time by the pool on Friday and Saturday afternoons (had to hide from a freak shower that blew through on Saturday). We played one of the most difficult and enjoyable miniature golf courses I've ever played. We ate out. We shopped. We sat in stop and go traffic forever. We discovered the secret passage from our motel to the area of town where everything we wanted to do seemed to be located. It was a pretty good trip. So, a couple of observations.

The Ramada Inn (the one located pretty close to 65 on 76 - I offer this general description because there seems to be 2 of every chain in town) was well worth the price we paid. For $70/night we had a nice (though not extravagant by any means) ground floor room with a solid cable package (my definition of solid is that it had Fox News and multiple ESPN networks), close access to the pool, parking right outside, and a full, hot breakfast you wouldn't believe. (Johnny, if you're reading this, I think I might have found a venue for that thing we talked about)

The breakfast was outstanding, no really, I'd go back there just for that. The free high speed wireless only worked in the lobby and didn't want to work on Britt's iBook, so that was a disappointment, but it wasn't intended to be a working vacation anyway.

Observation number 2, and we're going to camp out here for a while, the quality of restaurant dinner salads has really deteriorated. It's bad enough that you have to pay $2-$4 extra for them at most restaurants now, but the fact that they now consist of a grand total of 3 lettuce leaves and 1 crouton is really irritating. Is it so hard to make a dinner salad that I can't actually see the bottom of before you set it down in front of me? I don't need the entire head of lettuce, there's still an entree to come, but I need enough to stop my stomach from growling while you take your merry sweet time getting the rest of the food out to me.

I - a guy that certainly understands costs and revenue streams - understand the financial implications of the salad. I understand restaurants are probably getting squeezed with rising prices on everything - especially food. I understand that there are probably a lot of salad bowls that get half eaten, so some genius decided to just start half filling them. I'm all for reducing waste (ask my wife out wasting food, she already fears for our children), but someone needs to hire me as a consultant on salad creation.

So here's my solution.

Fry them. Maybe if they just figured out a way to fry salads people would demand larger ones. Think about it. Every "fry-able" food in the universe can be ordered in a super-size, biggie, or other monstrous portion. If we just figure out how to fry a salad people will demand them by the pound. Somebody call Darden Restaurants, I just solved the dilemma. Too bad frying it would totally negate the purpose, structure, design, and intent of the salad. But hey, you could sell the crap out of them.