Mary’s Gourmet: ghost salad restaurant

It’s probably fair to count me among the nine out of ten of Americans the CDC says don’t eat enough fruit and vegetables. One problem is that my preferred diet of tacos, fried chicken, and BBQ doesn’t leave a lot of room for their recommended five cups of produce every day. Then there’s the math problem: how many French fries and onion rings add up to a cup anyway?

A Miramar business may have figured out a way to slip healthier produce into my life, by leveraging my urge to sit around and have food brought to my doorstep. Mary’s Gourmet Salads, known in web parlance as OrderMarys.com, is a ghost restaurant, run out of a commercial kitchen with no public storefront. It only takes online orders, and only serves salads, fully prepped, chopped, and delivered to your doorstep for a flat fee of $2.99.

Actually, the people at Mary’s mentioned they do plan to branch out with three storefronts in 2020, targeting La Jolla, Little Italy, and Pacific Beach neighborhoods. But there are a lot of cheeseburgers between now and then, so for now I’m focused on Mary’s promise to boost my vegetable intake by delivering me a big salad within 45 minutes. The site’s menu offers nine meal-size salads ranging between $10.79 and $13.79.

I assume eating superfoods counts double toward those five recommended cups of fruit and vegetables, so the superfood salad immediately piqued my interest. Based on a chopped trio of kale, spinach, and purple cabbage, this thing really goes full throttle veg-friendly: broccoli, roasted sweet potatoes, avocado all chopped into bite size pieces. Goji berries and pomegranate seeds brighten it up, and a green dressing adds basil savor. Quinoa and sunflower seeds give it grainy heft. I dig it.

Add-in toppings for any salad include bacon, organic roasted chicken, and grilled steak, and several salads feature meat. The Summer Breeze adds chicken to a bunch of greens, sunflower seeds and quinoa, feta cheese, avocado, and strawberries. Not all the salads feature fruit, and while this salad was pretty good, I should rather have gone for the artichoke hearts and kalamata olives of another salad on the menu.

As for how many cups of produce these contain, the evenly distributed salads and dressing containers each fill a six-cup tub. That means one of these salads for lunch frees dinner up for pizza or cheesesteaks, right?

Of course, that plastic tub is the rub. It’s recyclable plastic, but still plastic. I’ll have to go back and recheck the healthy vs. lazy vs. earth-friendly calculus and look forward to Mary’s Gourmet Salads opening storefronts to visit.