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Do you like Gorgonzola as much as the Chess star does?
Photo: Jackson McHenry
Amazing things are happening in the arena of “Lea Michele campaigning for a Tony Award for her performance in Chess by emphasizing how deeply connected she is to the theater industry.” She did a Playbill “My Life in the Theatre” interview. She got a Sardi’s portrait that looks like Idina Menzel (Menzel’s own portrait looks like someone else entirely). And most important, she got a salad at New York’s Joe Allen named after her, which was randomly announced on The Drew Barrymore Show.
If you go to the Theater District spot right now, you can order a Lea Michele Cajun Chicken Salad for 26 bucks. There are no other celebrity items on the menu, and as far as we can tell, there’s no particular connection between Michele and Cajun cuisine — paging through Google’s archive of old Joe Allen menus, however, we did notice the restaurant used to serve a “Cajun chicken sandwich,” which seems to have been transmogrified into a salad for this press opportunity. (Insiders have told us that Cajun chicken dishes, whether in salad or sandwich form, have rotated through the menu in the past.)
Before seeing Fallen Angels last week, my colleague Rebecca Alter and I decided we simply had to order the salad, which features a few slabs of well-cooked chicken breast over romaine lettuce with a handful of toasted bread crumbs and a dressing that is Gorgonzola-forward in a way that makes you think, I don’t really like Gorgonzola as much as Lea Michele does. (She told Barrymore she loves it.) It’s not a bad salad, but like the musical Chess, it’s daring, lopsided, and somehow redolent of the 1980s. It would be improved if the Cajun spice, only really dusted on top of the meat, had more kick to offset the dressing. After a few bites, we both agreed Rebecca’s traditional Caesar-salad order had a more conventional, appealing balance of flavors.
We’ll also note that the food came, as usual, promptly in time for our curtain and that the server didn’t blink an eye over my awkward decision to order the salad by its full listed name — though she never said “Lea Michele” out loud. She presented our entrées by saying, “For her, the Caesar,” and then turned and placed my bowl down on the table without comment.
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