A salad bar restaurant has opened around the corner from my office and already I have noticed my weekly food costs have increased.

Chop’t a self described “creative salad company” has a menu that almost has too many options for its customers to choose from.

Menu items include: 15 meat/protein options, 27 random toppings, five kinds of lettuce, six crunchy toppings, five fruits and eight cheeses.

Many of the pre-designed salads are vegetarian, although meat can be added at a price. This makes it nearly impossible to leave there without paying at least $10 for a salad. Granted, the salad is HUGE.

Pre-designed salads include Sante Fe (romaine, jack cheese, avocado, tomato, corn and friend onion), Grilled Asian (spinach and romaine, carrots, slivered almonds, oranges, snow peas and crispy Chinese noodles) and the Chop’tpo’boy (Romaine, grilled steak, fried onion and tomato).

Although there is almost always a line of people extending outside the building, it moves suprisingly fast.

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The good news for me is that most of the ingredients and all the salad dressings are made on a daily basis by a central kitchen. I’ve talked to one of the managers all about it. This means that most of the dressings are Gluten free (i.e. not stuffed with cost cutting fillers such as wheat flour and crappy preservatives). Yay for me.

Plus, the size of the salad does a good job filing you up. A good enough job that a coworker of mine, who is a steak and potatoes kinda guy, has eaten there for 13 work days in a row.