Lemonade

I met a friend for lunch at Lemonade today. Since I arrived before her, I spent some time watching people go through the cafeteria style line up. I had heard a lot about the braises and pot roasts so I was pretty surprised to see that everyone stuck with the salads. Was it because it was lunch time and braises would be too heavy? Most of the customers seem to be locals so perhaps it was a Venice residents' thing? I kind of started feeling guilty about not eating as much vegetables lately and I figured that I could not go wrong following everyone else, so when my friend arrived, I decided to go for the salads.

I decided to split a two-portion salad plate so that I could try four salads. They were all delicious! The first salad had spinach, figs, and blue cheese. I was a bit apprehensive about the figs in case they wouldn't be ripe enough, but the lady at the counter offered me a taste first and I found the figs to be heavy and sweet as they should be.

Then for the second I picked the braised red cabbage with goat cheese. The lady at the counter was very enthusiastic about this salad--she made sure I got two generous dollops of the cheese, which she thought made the salad--such that I was too embarrassed to ask her to go light on the cheese. The cheese was nice, though, to cut some of the tanginess of the cabbage.

The freshest of the batch was a quinoa, radish, and cucumber salad with a very light orange ginger vinaigrette. I'm often afraid of citrusy and fruity dressings because they tend to be too sweet but that was not the case here and the sweetness was balanced by the bitterness of the radish.

My favorite salad of the bunch was the beautiful watermelon radish, seared ahi tuna, and snap peas with sesame. I don't know who came up with this combination, but this is definitely one of the best salads I've ever had. I can't decide if I like this salad better than the 7 veggie salad at Bao, but it definitely wins the beauty contest. It's too bad I don't have a habit of photographing what I eat else you would be jealous. Ok, maybe not. I just checked the photos uploaded on yelp! and...it's not that photogenic after all. Anyway, I highly recommend it!

Lemonade
1661 Abbot Kinney Blvd (at Venice Blvd)
Los Angeles, CA 90291
310-452-6200
www.lemonadela.com