Pig Salad
An Open-Source Restaurant Idea That Could Help Change the Way Restaurants Think
Pig Salad is a free-source, open-source restaurant concept.
The idea described here is being shared publicly because I would genuinely like to see somebody use it.
Build it. Adapt it. Improve it. Open your own version. Borrow the principles for an existing restaurant. Take one good idea from it or take twenty.
The larger purpose is not simply to imagine one restaurant called Pig Salad. It is to suggest a different architecture for restaurants generally—one built around fresh food, genuine customization, hospitality, local sourcing, transparency, humor, beauty, generosity, and respect for the person eating the meal.
Restaurants do not have to feed people inexpensive filler simply because that is how restaurants have traditionally protected margins.
Healthy food does not have to feel punitive.
Customization does not have to be inconvenient.
A restaurant does not have to hide its recipes to earn repeat customers.
Consistency does not have to mean every tomato came from the same enormous corporate distribution system.
And eating well certainly does not have to be boring.
The entire concept began, appropriately enough, with dinner.
The Accidental Birth of Pig Salad
One evening I opened the refrigerator and looked at what I had.
There was a beautiful crisp head of romaine lettuce, several incredibly ripe and juicy tomatoes that had reached that wonderful point where they needed to be eaten immediately, three cold pork chops left from another meal, freshly shredded cheese, and homemade blue cheese dressing I had made the day before—thick, creamy, and full of substantial chunks of blue cheese.
I chopped the romaine.
I cut up those wonderful tomatoes.
Then I diced the pork chops cold.
Yes, cold pork chops.
Try it sometime. You may be surprised.
I added the shredded cheese and that mouthwatering homemade blue cheese dressing.
Looking at it, the obvious description occurred to me:
Pork salad.
Then came the second thought:
Pig Salad.
I laughed.
The irony was perfect.
And then something unexpected happened.
Instead of ending with a joke and a good dinner, the idea started exploding.
Within perhaps ten minutes, Pig Salad had become an entire restaurant in my head.
What if salad were not treated as the obligatory little bowl placed beside the “real” meal?
What if the salad was the real meal?
What if it were abundant, beautiful, fresh, satisfying, customizable, colorful and made completely to order?
What if the restaurant were simultaneously funny and serious?
What if eating healthy food felt less like sacrifice and more like a celebration?
And that is where Pig Salad really began.
PIG SALAD
A Blessed Celebration of Life
That phrase eventually became the heart of the concept.
Pig Salad is not supposed to be a diet restaurant.
It is not anti-meat.
It is not anti-bread.
It is not vegan, carnivore, keto, low-carb or high-carb.
It is not interested in joining somebody else's food religion.
It is interested in good food.
Fresh vegetables.
Fruit.
Eggs.
Quality proteins.
Cheese.
Herbs.
Spices.
Excellent dressings.
Wonderful bread when you want bread.
And the freedom to combine those things according to what you actually enjoy eating.
The restaurant's job is not to dictate your meal.
Its job is to give you excellent ingredients and help you create it.
Every Meal Made to Order
Every Pig Salad menu item should be prepared to order.
That is fundamental.
The restaurant might offer carefully designed signature dishes, but they are starting points rather than commandments.
Customers should be encouraged to change them.
More tomato.
No onions.
Extra mushrooms.
Different cheese.
Chicken instead of pork.
No meat at all.
More vegetables.
Less dressing.
Extra spice.
Half the cheese.
Raspberry vinaigrette instead.
Whatever makes that meal right for that person.
The kitchen should be organized from the beginning around customization so that a customer making a reasonable change is not treated as a disruption to the system.
Customization is the system.
Pig Salad should give customers the ingredients and possibilities necessary to decorate and garnish nearly every aspect of what eventually arrives at their table.
The restaurant creates the canvas.
The customer participates in the art.
Sandwich Deconstruction
One of Pig Salad's signature menu sections would be:
Sandwich Deconstruction
The premise is wonderfully simple.
Take famous, beloved sandwiches and preserve the flavors people actually love—the meats, cheeses, vegetables, pickles, herbs, seasonings and sauces—but reconstruct the sandwich as a substantial salad.
A BLT becomes bacon, wonderful tomatoes and crisp lettuce with the appropriate dressing.
An Italian sub becomes salami, capicola, pepperoni, provolone, peppers, onions, tomatoes, greens, oil and vinegar.
A Reuben becomes corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, pickles and Russian-style dressing.
A Philly-style sandwich becomes shaved steak, peppers, onions, mushrooms and cheese over greens.
A club becomes turkey, ham, bacon, tomato, cheese and lettuce.
A Cuban can become roast pork, ham, Swiss, pickle and mustard-inspired dressing.
A cheeseburger can become chopped beef, cheddar, tomatoes, onions, pickles and the appropriate sauce.
The objective is not simply to place sandwich ingredients on lettuce and borrow the sandwich's name.
The challenge is to reproduce the recognizable flavor architecture of the sandwich in another form.
That distinction matters.
Bread Is Welcome. Bread Just Isn't in Charge.
Bread is wonderful.
Good bread can be one of the great pleasures of a meal.
The problem is that restaurants often rely upon enormous portions of inexpensive bread as filler. A giant bun can overwhelm everything inside it. Large quantities of highly processed bread can leave some people feeling bloated or uncomfortable, and different people avoid different breads for many different reasons.
Pig Salad would never tell customers that bread is bad.
We simply would not make bread responsible for making a plate appear substantial.
We want to serve people fresh and healthy food that we are happy to serve them.
Want bread?
Wonderful.
Pig Salad would offer excellent freshly toasted croutons, and customers could have as many as they reasonably wanted with their meal.
Bread therefore becomes something you choose rather than something the restaurant uses to create the illusion of value.
We didn't take away your bread. We cut it into little squares.
Dressing—and Undressing
One of the best pieces of Pig Salad language was created completely by accident.
While discussing custom salad dressings, voice recognition changed the word dressing into undressing.
That mistake was far too good to correct.
Thus Pig Salad gained:
Dressing & Undressing
Customers can choose from excellent house dressings—blue cheese, raspberry vinaigrette, balsamic preparations, ranch, Caesar-style dressings, mustard-based dressings and others.
They could also create combinations from available ingredients.
Oil.
Vinegars.
Citrus.
Mustards.
Herbs.
Spices.
Honey.
Fruit components.
Ginger.
Whatever the restaurant ultimately develops.
And naturally, the menu requires the warning:
No refunds for unfortunate undressing decisions.
Just kidding. 😂
But custom undressings should be delivered on the side.
If you choose to ruin a perfectly good meal yourself, Pig Salad accepts no artistic responsibility.
That is between you and your salad.
The joke also reveals something deeper about the restaurant.
Pig Salad begins developing its own culinary grammar:
Dress the food.
Undress the food.
Deconstruct the food.
Reconstruct the flavor.
The customer is no longer simply ordering a fixed object from a list.
The customer is participating in food architecture.
The Omelette Menu
That philosophy naturally extends into breakfast and brunch.
Pig Salad should have a substantial made-to-order omelette menu.
An omelette is almost the breakfast equivalent of Sandwich Deconstruction: the usual carbohydrate-heavy structure is unnecessary, and the proteins, vegetables, cheeses, herbs and sauces become the meal itself.
Customers might choose established combinations or build their own.
Ham and Swiss.
Steak and peppers.
Mushroom and spinach.
Tomato and feta.
Bacon and blue cheese.
Fresh herbs.
Seasonal vegetables.
Or perhaps a customer sees a combination elsewhere on the menu and simply says:
Put that in an omelette.
Why not?
The kitchen architecture should encourage creativity rather than resist it.
“How Are You Feeling Today?”
Another section of the menu could begin with an unusual restaurant question:
How Are You Feeling Today?
Instead of organizing food only by ingredient or conventional meal category, some dishes could be designed around the experience someone wants from the meal.
Something bright and refreshing.
Something warm and comforting.
Something spicy and exciting.
Something light.
Something substantial.
Something cool and crisp.
Something earthy.
Something sweet and savory.
Something surprising.
This does not require dubious medical promises.
Food is not medicine simply because a menu says so.
But meals absolutely have texture, temperature, aroma, freshness, flavor and emotional character.
People routinely choose food according to mood.
Why shouldn't the menu acknowledge that?
Pig Salad can celebrate food as living art and nourishment without pretending that dinner is a pharmaceutical treatment.
Pure but Pricey
Fresh fruit smoothies would have their own Pig Salad sense of humor.
The section might simply be called:
PURE BUT PRICEY
Because real fruit costs money.
There is nothing wrong with saying so.
A genuine strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, mango, peach or pineapple smoothie made from excellent fruit and real yogurt should not pretend to compete in price with a cup primarily composed of ice, syrup, artificial flavoring and inexpensive sweetener.
Pig Salad could offer the best natural fruit smoothies and yogurt combinations it can reasonably make, then allow customers to customize them.
Add ginger powder.
Add maca.
Add milk powder.
Choose yogurt or no yogurt.
Sugar or no added sugar.
Stevia or no stevia.
Honey where appropriate.
Extra fruit.
Whatever combinations ultimately prove delicious.
The rule remains simple:
Real ingredients.
A few menu names almost write themselves:
Berry Expensive.
Mango Money.
Raspberry Ransom.
The Fruit Mortgage.
The humor tells customers that the restaurant understands what good ingredients cost while refusing to quietly replace them with cheap substitutes.
Generosity Matters
One of the inspirations worth studying is the great American casual-dining restaurant.
Olive Garden, for example, has demonstrated for decades that people appreciate several things enormously:
Good food.
Generous portions.
Fair perceived value.
Attractive surroundings.
Friendly service.
Attentive staff.
Consistency.
A pleasant place to spend time with people they care about.
Pig Salad does not need to imitate another restaurant's cuisine, branding or corporate architecture.
It should instead study why people happily return to successful restaurants year after year.
What makes customers comfortable?
What makes a room pleasant?
What makes service feel gracious rather than mechanical?
What makes somebody leave believing the meal was worth the price?
Every successful restaurant contains lessons.
Study them.
Take the best ideas.
Then build something original.
Hiring Is Part of the Product
Great service cannot simply be written into an employee manual.
Training matters enormously.
Employees need to understand the menu, food safety, timing, cleanliness, customization, table service, ordering systems and restaurant standards.
But training has limits.
It is difficult to train someone to possess genuine warmth if that quality is entirely absent.
It is difficult to manufacture patience.
Situational awareness.
Empathy.
Natural friendliness.
The instinct to notice that a table needs something before someone has to wave down the server.
That is why hiring matters so much.
Pig Salad should hire carefully for natural hospitality and then provide excellent training.
The philosophy could be:
Hire the qualities. Train the system.
Employees should not be forced into identical robotic personalities.
A naturally funny server should be allowed to be funny.
A quieter, gracious person should be allowed to serve in that way.
Standardize the quality of hospitality without standardizing the human being delivering it.
And reward excellence.
Customer compliments should matter.
Reliability should matter.
Teamwork should matter.
The employee who quietly makes everyone else's shift easier should matter.
Hospitality is not incidental to the restaurant.
Hospitality is one of the ingredients.
The Restaurant Should Be Beautiful
Food does not exist independently of the room where it is served.
Pig Salad should be aesthetically pleasing.
Warm.
Comfortable.
Thoughtfully designed.
The existing Pig Salad mascot and logo suggest an appealing palette naturally:
Soft cream.
Leaf and sage greens.
Warm pinks.
Natural woods.
Terracotta.
Perhaps subtle brass or copper details.
Living plants.
Comfortable seating.
Warm lighting.
Excellent acoustics.
Generous tables.
Enough space that people can enjoy their own conversation without feeling as though they have accidentally joined the table beside them.
The pig mascot provides humor.
The architecture itself does not need to become childish.
The objective should be a beautiful restaurant adults enjoy visiting that children also find delightful.
The room is part of the meal.
Local Food Without the False Promise of Identical Restaurants
If Pig Salad ever grew beyond one location, it should resist one of the great temptations of restaurant chains:
Making everything identical merely because identical purchasing is convenient.
Consistency is important.
But consistency should mean consistent standards, not necessarily identical suppliers.
A useful principle would be:
Standardize the standards, not the suppliers.
Every location should share expectations for freshness, cleanliness, hospitality, preparation, portion value and food safety.
But whenever practical, individual Pig Salad restaurants should source excellent food locally or regionally.
One restaurant may have access to remarkable tomatoes from a nearby farm.
Another may have wonderful apples.
Another might have an exceptional dairy producer or baker.
Seasonality should be treated as an opportunity rather than an inconvenience.
A Local & Seasonal portion of the menu could therefore change throughout the year and from one location to another.
Pig Salad should never need to disparage large food distributors by name.
The positive standard says everything necessary:
We don't choose an ingredient simply because it is easiest for us to purchase. We choose ingredients we are happy to serve to you fresh and healthy.
That is the promise.
Not artificial sameness.
Quality.
The Pig Salad Gift Shop—Without the Gift-Shop Hassle
Pig Salad's little pig mascot is almost begging to become merchandise.
Small plush pigs.
T-shirts.
Aprons.
Mugs.
Magnets.
Stickers.
Recipe cards.
Small kitchen items.
Perhaps salad bowls.
But the gift business should remain intentionally small, simple and easy to fulfill.
Nothing enormous.
Nothing cumbersome.
If an item cannot be stocked efficiently, packaged quickly and shipped reasonably, it probably does not belong there.
More importantly, there should be no separate gift-shop checkout ordeal.
Customers browse the merchandise as they enter, leave or walk around.
Then they can order merchandise along with their meal.
The server or ordering system simply asks:
Taking it with you?
Would you like it packaged as a gift?
Would you like it shipped?
By the time dinner is finished, the merchandise is bagged, wrapped or already entered for fulfillment.
Alternatively, every menu can provide the Pig Salad website or QR code.
See something you like?
Order it on your phone while waiting for dinner.
Enter the recipient's address.
Done.
Whenever practical, shipping should be inexpensive or incorporated directly into the item's price.
Three-day shipping would be an excellent operational target where available.
Enjoy your dinner.
Enjoy your outing.
Drive home.
The gifts will be on their way.
No lines. No additional checkout. No hassle.
Even buying the little pig should be easy.
The Cookbook That Tells You How to Stop Paying Us
Pig Salad should sell cookbooks.
And the recipes should actually be useful.
The restaurant should not hide its best ideas and pretend customers must return simply because some secret sauce has been locked in a vault.
Quite the opposite.
Learn how to make our favorite salads.
Learn our Sandwich Deconstructions.
Learn our dressings.
Learn our undressings.
Learn the omelettes.
Learn the smoothies.
Learn the combinations you discovered while eating here.
Take the idea home.
Save money.
Feed yourself and the people you love.
Then come back to Pig Salad when you want someone else to shop, chop, prepare, serve and clean up—or when you simply want to celebrate Life around a table with friends.
That philosophy might sound commercially backwards.
It isn't.
Trust creates loyalty.
Imagine a restaurant effectively telling its customers:
You don't need to pay us every time you want this meal. Here's how to make it yourself. Save your money. We'll be here when you want to come back.
People remember businesses that treat them like human beings rather than extraction opportunities.
A perfect Pig Salad cookbook title may therefore be:
Pig Salad
How to Eat Here Without Eating Here
$9.16
Of course, Pig Salad should never become so serious that it forgets the joke that created it.
The signature promotion practically demands to exist:
ALL YOU CAN EAT PIG SALAD
@ PIG SALAD
$9.16
Why $9.16?
Turn the calculator upside down.
PIG.
And “All You Can Eat Pig Salad” contains another joke hiding in plain sight:
All you can eat, pig.
The restaurant simultaneously advertises dinner and insults the customer for accepting the offer.
Affectionately, of course.
That humor is important.
Healthy restaurants can sometimes become unbearably solemn.
Pig Salad should never lecture people into eating well.
Make them laugh.
Give them something wonderful.
Let the philosophy emerge naturally.
Food Is Living Art
Underneath the jokes is something sincere.
Food can be beautiful.
Preparing it can be creative.
Eating it can be social.
Choosing what goes into your body can be an act of attention rather than deprivation.
A meal can involve color, fragrance, temperature, texture, memory, conversation and humor.
That is why Pig Salad describes food as living art.
Not because dinner needs pretentious language.
Quite the opposite.
Living art is art you can participate in.
You can change it.
Dress it.
Undress it.
Deconstruct it.
Reconstruct it.
Eat it.
Laugh about it.
And make another version tomorrow.
Eat Healthy Today
One phrase captures much of the philosophy:
Eat healthy today to stay healthy, so you don't have to eat healthy tomorrow to heal after suffering.
It is not a medical guarantee.
Life offers no such guarantees.
It is simply an argument for making good everyday choices before circumstances force those choices upon us.
Healthy food should not be reserved for the moment when someone has become frightened about health.
It can simply be delicious food.
Today.
A Restaurant People Visit Because They Want To
Pig Salad should not aspire to become the place people visit reluctantly because somebody in the group is “trying to eat healthy.”
It should be the restaurant everybody agrees on.
The person who wants steak can eat steak.
The vegan can build something wonderful.
The person who loves cheese can have cheese.
The person avoiding bread does not have to negotiate around it.
The person who loves bread can eat croutons.
Children can customize their meals.
Adults can experiment.
Someone wanting an enormous meal can leave satisfied.
Someone wanting something light can do that too.
Nobody needs to apologize for the way they want to eat.
Choice without judgment.
Not Every Pig Salad Should Be Identical
If the concept ever became successful enough to grow, there is another principle worth protecting:
Pig Salad locations should be siblings, not clones.
The mascot remains recognizable.
The philosophy remains recognizable.
The signature dishes remain.
The service standards remain.
The spirit remains.
But the building can reflect its community.
Local ingredients can appear.
Seasonal dishes can change.
Regional specialties can become deconstructions.
Individual chefs can contribute ideas.
A restaurant in Maryland should not have to pretend it exists in California.
A restaurant in Georgia should be allowed to taste a little like Georgia.
The purpose of scale should be to spread the philosophy—not erase locality.
The Larger Idea: Restaurants Could Change
Pig Salad is ultimately larger than Pig Salad.
Imagine more restaurants adopting some version of these principles.
Use bread because it is wonderful, not because it cheaply fills the plate.
Let customers control sauces and proportions.
Design menus around customization rather than treating customization as a nuisance.
Buy locally when practical.
Use seasonal ingredients.
Make health-oriented food abundant instead of ascetic.
Train people carefully.
Hire people who naturally understand hospitality.
Build beautiful dining rooms.
Give customers recipes.
Be transparent about ingredients.
Let each location possess some individuality.
Use humor.
Make the meal an experience without turning dinner into theater people didn't ask for.
Charge fairly.
Serve generously.
Give people enough choices without giving them chores.
The restaurant industry does not need another hundred identical concepts differentiated primarily by logos.
It needs experimentation in restaurant architecture.
Not just the architecture of the building.
The architecture of the meal.
The menu.
The supply chain.
The relationship between restaurant and customer.
The relationship between standardized systems and individual choice.
The relationship between health and pleasure.
The relationship between eating at a restaurant and learning to eat better at home.
Pig Salad is one proposal for what that architecture could look like.
Someone else will undoubtedly think of something better.
Good.
That's the entire reason for sharing it.
Build It
Nothing starts as a chain.
Everything starts somewhere.
One restaurant.
One kitchen.
One dining room.
One group of employees.
One community.
One strange idea.
Pig Salad itself started with a head of romaine lettuce, several gloriously ripe tomatoes, three cold pork chops, shredded cheese and homemade chunky blue cheese dressing.
Then came two words:
Pig Salad.
Then came laughter.
Then the mental fireworks.
Perhaps someday somebody will actually build it.
If they do, I hope they make it beautiful.
I hope they treat their employees well.
I hope they buy wonderful food.
I hope they let customers change everything.
I hope they teach people how to make the food themselves.
I hope people leave feeling full without feeling miserable.
I hope children want the little pig.
I hope somebody orders an unfortunate undressing.
And above all, I hope people gather around the tables and remember that eating together is one of the simplest and oldest pleasures human beings have.
PIG SALAD
Where Food Is Living Art.
Fresh and Healthy. Made the Way You Want It.
A Blessed Celebration of Life.
The idea is free. Take it somewhere wonderful.
