When chef Roy Choi set out to make the perfect salad for people who hate salad, he knew exactly the feeling he was chasing: that moment when you’re 13 or 14 — when everything about you feels scrutinized: your body, your choices, your appetite — and suddenly, you’re set loose at a TGI Friday’s or Sizzler, or even the fake-plant-covered solarium of a Wendy’s. No rules. No adults hovering. Just you and the salad bar, with its chilled metal bins and endless possibilities. It felt like freedom.

“This salad is for people who never really liked to eat salads,” he told me in a recent Zoom conversation. “But the one salad we did like to eat? The salad bar salad.” 

At the salad bar, no one could tell you what to do or what not to eat. You weren’t being lectured about your choices. You were choosing. Choi — known best as the creator of the gourmet Korean-Mexican taco truck Kogi and for his turn on “The Chef Show” with Jon Favreau — calls it a kind of force field. A portal. Like putting headphones on in a loud room and turning up the volume. 

“Even if someone was always on your ass, like, ‘You can’t eat this, you’re eating too much of that,’ they couldn’t say anything,” Choi said. “Because it said ‘salad,’ that word protected you. You were in control.”

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So yeah, maybe you only took three leaves of chopped lettuce. Maybe you piled on corn, macaroni salad, tortilla strips and three scoops of ranch. It didn’t matter. You made your own rules. That’s what Roy’s calling back to with his Big F**king Salad, a recipe that’s a maximalist monument to flavor and autonomy, packed with greens, corn, button mushrooms, apple slices, orange segments, cheese and options for crunch. It’s not just a cheeky name — it’s a thesis. One that echoes the larger philosophy of “The Choi of Cooking,” his new book built on balance, compassion and a rejection of the all-or-nothing thinking so many of us carry about food.

“If a salad could eat like a

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