A perk of having grown (or nearly grown) children is when they move to cool places, you get to visit them.
A year ago, our daughter moved to Tampa, Florida, for grad school. We went to visit her shortly after she arrived to help get her settled. We stayed in a then brand new hotel in downtown Tampa. We ate in the hotel’s restaurant for our first meal there.
I ordered a salad.
It was perfect.
So perfect that I couldn’t stop talking about how much I loved that salad. It had a variety of greens, vegetables and toasted quinoa, an avocado mousse and a shishito pepper vinaigrette.
I thought about the salad all the way home, plotting how I would recreate it. I bought the dark quinoa. I experimented with figuring out how to make it cooked and simultaneously crispy. I dreamed about the salad dressing. The problem was, at that time, I couldn’t find shisito peppers.
Then, I thought, “I bet I could grow shishito peppers.”
Turns on that I was right about that. I ordered two plants and until our move to Baton Rouge in March, I had all the shishito peppers a girl could want — from two very prolific plants. They grew near my front door, and I often gave them as parting gifts as friends were leaving.
Even with all those shishito peppers, I could not get the dressing right. Despite my experimentation, something just didn’t work out.
But I kept thinking about that salad.
When we planned our visit to Tampa this summer for June 24, the day I finished the intense grad school program I’ve been in for the last year — it was a trip of celebration.
I knew three things about this trip. I would be reading light fiction. I would be eating at least one meal at the restaurant in the hotel where we stayed last year. And, that while the rest of my family was planning a day in Disney, I would not be joining them.
Instead, while my family was in the happiest place on earth, I had a hotel room to myself, a good book (a light read that was music to my ears after a year of grad school and no fun reading) and lunch plans at the restaurant that served a salad that had stayed with me for a year. Don’t be fooled — I was the one in the happiest place on earth.
When I arrived at the restaurant (good book in hand), I was seated at a corner table overlooking Tampa Bay. I looked at the menu — there was my salad. However, when I started reading the description, it did not mesh with my memory. The waitress appeared and I asked her about the salad, explaining I had enjoyed it a year ago and couldn’t wait to have it again.
She had to bear the news that they had changed their menu a month ago, but she would ask the kitchen to do what they could to make it as close to the old salad as possible. The good news was: it still had the shishito vinaigrette.
She brought my lunch. The salad wasn’t the same as last year, but it was delightful. I ate thing and sat there, enjoying my fizzy water with lime while reading my book.
The waitress reappeared to take my plate and then brought my check, holding a separate piece of paper in her hand. She said, “I know you said how much you like the salad dressing. So, I asked and got the recipe for you. Here you go!”
She handed me the handwritten instructions and recipe for the shishito vinaigrette that I had dreamed about for the last year and said, “I also gave you two small containers of the dressing so you’ll know what it’s like before you make it.” And she handed me a bag with two containers of the salad dressing in it.
Morgan Ennis, who works at Six, the restaurant in J.W. Marriott in Tampa, Florida, surprised Jan Risher by sharing the recipe for the shishito pepper vinaigrette salad dressing June 27, 2022.
I was stunned — and I am not stunned often. I couldn’t believe the extra effort she had taken. I had considered asking for hints on the recipe for the salad dressing, but I shied away from doing so.
Nonetheless, my wishes came true. It was a lunch for one full of magic.
Lucky for me, Morgan Ennis was my waitress at Six, the restaurant in the JW Marriot in Tampa. Also, lucky for me: I saved plenty of shishito seeds from the bounty of my garden in Lafayette.
Now I have reason to get that garden growing in my new home. Give me a month or so, but be assured that if I invite you over for dinner — say this fall, chances are you already know what kind of salad dressing we’ll be having.
