Maxbauer's Salad Bar
Tastemaker
The irony of a revered, century-old butcher shop installing a salad bar on its customer floor isn’t lost on us. But honestly, irony has never tasted so fresh and delicious. Or been so fairly priced. In a snub to conventional salad bars, Maxbauer Specialty Meat Market lays out a modest but truly, madly, and deeply ripe mélange of greens and fresh veggies; the kind of moist hand-cut meats you’d expect from Maxbauer (chicken breast, real bacon, and ham have been the headliners during our last several visits); and some welcome, oft-rotating surprises: dried cherries, fat cheese-stuffed olives, Giardinera, and more. It truly is enough to be greeted with un-wilted lettuces and spinach; broccoli sans brown spots; grape tomatoes without white-ish cores; and snappy matchstick carrots moist as the morning they were sliced. But Maxbauer goes even further, dancing where few salad bars dare and pricing your nutritional assemblage not by its weight but by how damn much you can squeeze into a small ($5.99, pictured) or large ($8.99) to-go container. Never again must you forgo too-juicy tomatoes or choose crouton over seed; this budget-savvy bounty is yours for the taking — provided you take as fairly as your trough is priced. (Read: Don’t pack a pound of chicken breast inside a wall of cucumbers wheels and screw it up for the rest of us, Buddy.) Find it at 407 S. Union St., Traverse City. (231) 947-7698, www.maxbauers.com.