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Is All This Salt Killing Us?
Photo: Grub Street
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I’ll show you some tricks, but you might not be happy when you see them,” says Harold Moore as we make our way back to the galley-size kitchen at his excellent restaurant, Cafe Commerce, which has been doing a brisk business ever since it opened in January on the Upper East Side. There are two tubs of salted butter in the snug space and another two tubs holding different varieties of salt, both of which Moore’s sous-chefs are sprinkling liberally onto roasted chickens, into pots of pasta water, and onto great wheels of chicken schnitzel that are served with tufts of salted salad on top. “It’s all about those first two bites,” Moore says. “They have to be memorable — they have to pop.”
Moore, who has lost 80 pounds in the past two years on what he describes as a diet of “green beans and coffee,” is looking a little wistfully at the bowl of rigatoni carbonara that has been placed at the pass for his inspection before being whisked out into the crowded dining room. This sinful agglomeration of bacon, salted pork jowls, and salted butter that’s finished with clouds of salty Parm and a heavy egg yolk for good measure is one of the restaurant’s best sellers. Ditto Moore’s signature poulet rôti, a recipe he perfected years ago at a long-vanished fine-dining establishment called Montrachet after he’d ordered too many chickens for the evening service. To sell as many of the excess birds as possible, he injected a mix of herbs and salted butter under the skin, filled their salted cavities with a bread stuffing, and served the dish with a gravy made of buttery pan drippings. The chickens sold out, and he’s been featuring the dish at his restaurants ever since. “If we didn’t add a lot of seasoning to everything,” Moore says, “people would complain, that’s for sure.”
If you’ve spent any time dining around town in the increasingly clamorous, pricey, TikTok-addled world of upscale big-city restaurants, you may have noticed a marked rise in the use of the favorite flavor enhancers of professional cooks everywhere. “Costs are going up, portions are getting smaller, everyone’s distracted and taking pictures, so the way you get people’s attention is to amp everything up,” says one chef, who calls this the age of “Maximum Flavor.” There seems to be more butter on everything, more umami-rich fats and oils, and ever-more salt, which was so thick on a $130 order of prime rib during a recent visit to Daniel Boulud’s opulent steakhouse, La Tête d’Or, that I took a couple of eager, tasty bites before quietly pushing the dish away.
In this time of Maximum Flavor, it’s not uncommon to find a $25 salad bombed with salted nuts or handfuls of crisp fried shallots, among other salt-laden goodies (the French Wedge at La Tête d’Or includes a generous garnish of smoked beef tongue). Chefs have many different tricks to achieve Maximum Flavor: Paul Carmichael sears and fries Tyrannosaurus-size pork chops at Kabawa, Maxime Pradié whips a bit of liver into the chicken ragout he tosses with pasta at Zimmi’s. “Everybody knows restaurant food is more decadent than home cooking,” Moore notes. But for all the talk of celebrating seasonal Greenmarket vegetables, cooking with alternatives to recently vilified seed oils, or ditching high-fat strip steaks in favor of dry-aged branzino charred on the grill, restaurant food is not health food — and the one ingredient that chefs will never abandon is lowly table salt, which in a world filled with conspicuous hazards might just be the most conspicuous hazard of all. Anyone who eats out even a couple nights each week is probably, but unknowingly, pummeling their systems with the stuff.
“Salt is the reason my doctor didn’t want me eating in restaurants,” says Andrew Friedman, who has written cookbooks with numerous prominent, salt-happy chefs and who suffers from congestive heart failure, a condition that is thankfully under control. Too much salt is a major cause of high blood pressure, which is associated with all sorts of gloomy outcomes, including cardiovascular problems, inflammation, autoimmune diseases, gastric cancer, obesity, eyesight loss, kidney failure, cognitive impairment, osteoporosis, kidney stones, gout, and bloating. (Estimates suggest that excessive sodium consumption also kills up to 100,000 people per year in the U.S.) The American Heart Association considers less than 1,500 milligrams of sodium to be the “ideal” daily amount for adults, but even the FDA’s more permissive suggestion — fewer than 2,300 milligrams per day — is, by the standards of a professional kitchen, minuscule. “That’s roughly a teaspoon of salt,” Friedman says, “so you can imagine what you’re getting at a restaurant.”
Don’t ever eat a potato … They shouldn’t be allowed in restaurants.
To figure out exactly how much, my colleagues at New York ordered popular dishes from well-known restaurants around town and sent them, frozen but otherwise untouched, to a lab for testing and analysis. It would take about a dozen generous pinches of salt to reach that daily recommended teaspoon, and when the results came back, they showed that anyone eating a nice dinner in this town is likely eating an entire day’s worth of sodium in one sitting (or, occasionally, in one course). A meal at Via Carota consisting of chef Rita Sodi’s sherry-and-shallot-dressed green salad, a bowl of Pecorino-laced cacio e pepe, and a few hunks of fried rabbit for the entrée clocks in at approximately 1,900 milligrams of sodium. Minetta Tavern’s famous Black Label hamburger with caramelized onions and a tidy pile of perfect fries is 1,385 milligrams. (A serving of Fritos, for comparison, offers 170 milligrams of sodium.) Moore’s roasted chicken, designed to be split among diners, nevertheless carries over 900 milligrams, plus 1,660 more for the mashed potatoes and stuffing. Dessert, in the form of an enormous slice of devil’s-food cake at Claud, could mean adding nearly 1,000 more milligrams before the check is paid.
Friedman points out that generous salting is encouraged in the cookbook realm (“to taste” is the preferred phrase) and that all cooking icons going back at least to Julia Child are proud, stout members of the Salt and Fat School. Friedman remembers being taught how to blanch vegetables at cooking school downtown and hearing the instructor cry, “Your water should taste like Coney Island!” Every great cuisine needs a measure of salty goodness to taste delicious, and in the world of gourmet cookery, nobody seasons their food as rigorously as the French. “French cooking is more tortured; there are more steps to everything,” says Moore, who was once charged with concocting up to 16 different soups each day when he worked for Boulud. “You can’t add the salt at the end of the recipe and have the same flavor — you have to season as you go, so the more steps, the more layers of flavor you’re building, the more salt.” Moore concedes that the palates of many top chefs have been blitzed by too much salt, a necessary risk of the job.
“The deal on salt is the more of it you eat, the more you prefer, and if you’re already eating a lot of salt, you need more of it to make your food taste better” says the nutritionist Marion Nestle, who has been critical of the excess salt in restaurant and processed foods for years. Another critic is the sustainability entrepreneur Sam Kass, who rose to prominence as the health-conscious chef for the Obamas during their White House years. He says there are myriad ways to avoid salt at home, but he hasn’t seen much change in the restaurant culture. “The chef’s attitude is, ‘We could make really healthy food, but then people will go somewhere else,’” he says. “They’re not wrong. They’re trying to run their businesses and keep their employees paid.” Kass remembers being repeatedly cursed out by a sous-chef at his first fancy European restaurant job for not adding enough butter to a dish, then looking out into the dining room and realizing in the moment that “everybody looks like shit out there, everybody looks sick, everybody looks really unwell.” He quit the job soon after and stayed away from restaurant work from then on.
If you want to avoid salt at a restaurant, the rule is don’t go to a restaurant, because it’s more or less everywhere. Prime culprits include any pieces of meat, even “healthy” options like grilled swordfish or nicely roasted halibut, all of which get mounted with spoonfuls of salty butter during the cooking process or served with enticingly salty sauces (like Jonathan Waxman’s Italian salsa verde enriched with anchovy fillets and salt-packed capers). Potatoes in any form are salt sponges — “Don’t ever eat a potato,” one of my doctors says. “They shouldn’t be allowed in restaurants” — and so are knotty vegetables like green beans or Brussels sprouts. Moore salt-roasts his sprouts, then finishes them in a mix of vinegar, honey, and the spreadable Italian pork sausage ’nduja. “It’s a very delicious way to eat something heinous,” he says. “At home, I’d probably give them a little salt and some lemon juice.”
Reasonable restaurants will try to accommodate requests for no salt, provided a diner asks and understands that certain items start being salted days before they’re actually cooked. And within the five boroughs, chains with 15 or more U.S. locations are required to warn customers about which of their dishes exceed the FDA’s recommended daily sodium limit. But at bespoke and critically lauded restaurants, there’s no way to know for sure. Michael F. Jacobson, co-founder of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, has been fighting the food industry and the FDA to reduce sodium levels since the 1970s. (He is also sometimes credited with popularizing the term junk food.) Throughout his career, he’s tested sodium levels in all types of cuisines — and it’s the same story everywhere. “We’ve found generally huge amounts of sodium in every kind of restaurant,” he says. “It’s cheap flavoring.”
Jerold Mande spent decades on public-health and food policy at the FDA and USDA, including leading the graphic design for the contemporary version of nutrition-facts labels on packaged foods. He says that, quantities aside, there’s no difference between the salt in those Fritos and the salt in the Black Label burger: “When it comes to the negative health impacts, sodium is sodium.” Mande laments that so many restaurants have been able to provide gluten-free menu options, but salt-light items remain a rarity. “I blame the industry,” he says. “They’ve convinced a lot of people that if you want your food to taste good, don’t do ‘low sodium.’” (When Mande worked on reducing sodium levels in school lunches for Barack Obama’s USDA, he heard industry complaints that the food was underseasoned. “The plan was dependent on the FDA and CDC leading the effort and setting mandatory goals to bring down sodium across society,” he says. “They just never did their part.”)
Greg Drescher, who co-leads many of the Culinary Institute of America’s initiatives on health and sustainability, explains that higher-quality ingredients can negate the need for excess salt. “More fruits and vegetables by themselves, that would solve much of this,” he says, since they require very little sodium to taste good. “But as soon as you start saying, ‘How do we reduce the amount of sodium in a double bacon cheeseburger?,’ it’s harder.”
Back in the kitchen at Cafe Commerce, chef Moore has kindly agreed to show me how he roasts two chickens from upstate — one in accordance with his famous bistro recipe and the other the way he would roast a chicken for a Sunday dinner at home. The two birds sit side by side; one of them looks slightly bloated and unwieldy, like the breast-heavy birds McDonald’s is rumored to use in its vast McNuggets-industrial complex, and the other looks like, well, a chicken. The restaurant bird has been salted on the inside; injected under the breast skin with large deposits of salty, generously herbed butter; and left to sit overnight in order for the salty enzymes to register the greatest impact. Moore doesn’t believe in brining, so the homestyle bird, meanwhile, is scattered with its first liberal dose of kosher salt (while more salt goes on the already-sodium-blasted restaurant chicken) just before both are popped into the oven for 40 or so minutes at 500 degrees.
When they come out of the heat, Moore’s homestyle Sunday chicken looks golden brown and relatively puny next to the bronzed, cheffed-up bird. The bulging, crackly skinned bistro chicken sits in a great pool of drippings and melted butter, which one of Moore’s cooks pours in a pan and commences to sauté with onions, buttered croutons, and nuggets of foie gras, salting the recipe every step of the way. Both chickens are quartered for serving, but the home chicken is garnished with a simple lemon, while the bistro bird is paired with the deliciously fatty foie gras stuffing. Which one tastes better? Not surprisingly, in my delicate, salt-addled state, I find myself focusing on the simpler chicken, although I can’t resist the foie gras stuffing, especially the buttery, salty, comforting croutons, which I devour one after another until every one is gone.
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