When I was a very young man, I had a job as an assistant maître d' at a white tablecloth restaurant in a swank hotel. It was the seventies and table-side cooking was all the rage. I learned how to make a number of things table-side to help out the waiters when they were getting slammed; things like Caesar's Salad, Strawberries Romanov, Bananas Foster, Steak Diane and Wilted Spinach Salad.
Years went by and one recent winter day, I had a couple of bags of fresh, pre-washed spinach lying around the refrigerator and decided to take a crack at recreating that wonderful recipe. To the best of my recollection, this version of the classic tastes pretty close. I thought of doing a variation on this by adding either goat cheese or feta cheese to the warm bacon dressing or maybe just crumbled on top of the salad, letting the warm dressing and spinach melt it a little before serving. While I have not completely ruled out the idea, that might make the salad too rich, at least as a first course. That might be better as a main course salad, though.
You don't see many restaurants that feature table-side cooking anymore. In fact, the only one I know of is Le Continental in Quebec City, and they've specialized in this kind of service since the 1960s. The restaurant was built for it. Table-side cooking requires more time and intensive training, especially if you're going to flambé anything, which means to pour alcohol into the pan while the grease is hot. It catches the dish on fire for a few moments until the alcohol burns off. It's showy, but that's really pretty dangerous if you think about it.
Then, too, you have to have room to roll your gueridon in-between dining tables. A gueridon is that little rolling table that waiters push around the restaurant. "Gueridon" sounds a lot classier than "little rolling table," don't you think? But the point is that more room between tables means fewer tables in the dining room; fewer tables and longer dinner times mean less turnover of customers and that means less revenue. Less revenue means less profit, and so it goes.
Plus, I'm sure that doing any open-air cooking anymore is eaten up with local health and fire code issues and if you intend to flambé anything, there are probably a whole litany of regulations if it is allowed at all. Then there's the heightened liability and the cost of insurance that follows.
{{Sigh}} The world was a much simpler place fifty years ago.
Ingredients
2-16 oz packages pre-washed baby spinach
1 shallot, finely diced
1/2 lb bacon, sliced into lardons
1 hard boiled egg, yolks removed and whites diced
2 tsp Splenda
1/3 cup cider vinegar
1/3 cup white wine
1 tsp powdered mustard (like, Coleman's)
1/3 tsp black pepper
The Recipe
Cook the bacon until very crisp and drain on paper towels. Pour off excess grease, but retain two tablespoons.
Over medium heat, saute the shallots until translucent. Add the mustard, pepper and Splenda until blended into the shallots.
Take the pan off of the stove and away from the heat, and then add the white wine and let it sizzle a moment, burning off the alcohol. Return the pan to the heat and stir in the vinegar, then bring the dressing to a boil.
Lower the heat a little, and simmer the dressing gently until the volume of liquid has reduced about ten-percent. Blend in the hard boiled egg yolks with a whisk and thicken the mixture. Take the dressing off the heat and allow it to cool slightly. Then, add the diced hard boiled egg whites and the crispy bacon bits to the dressing just before serving.
Pour the dressing over chilled spinach leaves in a large bowl and toss gently, letting the leaves wilt slightly. Serve immediately.
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