Great New Salads in Durham 

One of the perks about “working” at Durham Magazine is my quarterly lunch with my beloved editor, Andrea Griffith Cash. Since a huge part of the Magazine is about local food we are sure to try one of the new spots in town. Usually the problem is that so many places have yummy, delicious, and fattening fare. You can find a world class pizza, but finding a good for you and drool worthy salad is much harder than it should be.
Imagine my delight when Andrea suggested we meet at a new spot of ninth street called Happy and Hale, a salad and juice bar. I googled it and there is one in Raleigh, but the Durham one is not listed yet. Based on what I read I was excited to try it.
The bright sunny restaurant has big glass doors that open out to the street where there are a few tables on the sidewalk. It was already getting crowded so I dropped a couple of Durham Magazines on one of the tables, just inside, as we waited to order.
It is a place like Sweet Greens in DC or Hale and Hearty Soup in NYC. You can get one of their pre-determined salad offerings or a pick your own type thing. They had a lot of different greens as base offerings, with my go to arugula being one of them, three stars just for that. I got roast butternut squash that I was wary about because it still had the skin on it. My cute salad maker told me it was tender as could be and she was right. Roast red peppers, caramelized onions, cherry tomatoes, goat cheese and chicken and I was a happy camper. Andrea had the Acai bowl with coconut chips and granola. She liked it. It screamed breakfast to me.
As we were still in line I noticed a man had sat down at our table, so from across the room I let him know those were our magazines. He got the hint and moved over one seat. Turned out he was a photographer who would like to work for the magazine so he was nice to us when we came and sat down at our saved table.
After Andrea and I gabbed and enjoyed our healthy lunch a nice guy named Tyler, who is someone of authority at Happy and Hale, came by to clear our bowls and asked how everything was. After many compliments I did request unsweet tea and lemons cut into wedges, since the only tea they had was sweetened with agave. He promised that it was coming and he would never cut lemons into anything else but squeezable wedges (that is my life long crusade).
If you are looking for a healthy lunch I recommend Happy and Hale, in the spot where the old Duck shop used to be on the south end of ninth street across the street from the play house. Now, if we can just get more white table cloth restaurants to offer tasty, big and low calorie salads my life’s work of searching for lunch is half done. I still have to tackle the half moon slivers of lemons that can’t be squeezed thing. it.