A salad bar is a buffet

Buffet

A buffet is a system of serving meals in which food is placed in a public area where the diners generally serve themselves. Buffets are offered at various places including hotels and many social events...

-style table or counter at a restaurant or food market on which salad

Salad

Salad is any of a wide variety of dishes, including vegetable salads; salads of pasta, legumes, eggs, or grains; mixed salads incorporating meat, poultry, or seafood; and fruit salads. They may include a mixture of cold and hot, often including raw vegetables or fruits.Green salads include leaf...

 components are provided for customers to assemble their own salad plates. Most salad bars provide lettuce

Lettuce

Lettuce is a temperate annual or biennial plant of the daisy family Asteraceae. It is most often grown as a leaf vegetable. It is eaten either raw, notably in salads, sandwiches, hamburgers, tacos, and many other dishes, or cooked, as in Chinese cuisine in which the stem becomes just as important...

, chopped tomato

Tomato

The word "tomato" may refer to the plant or the edible, typically red, fruit which it bears. Originating in South America, the tomato was spread around the world following the Spanish colonization of the Americas, and its many varieties are now widely grown, often in greenhouses in cooler...

es, assorted raw, sliced vegetable

Vegetable

The noun vegetable usually means an edible plant or part of a plant other than a sweet fruit or seed. This typically means the leaf, stem, or root of a plant....

s (such as cucumbers, carrots, celery and green or red bell peppers), dried bread crouton

Crouton

A crouton is a small piece of sautéed or rebaked bread, often cubed and seasoned, that is used to add texture and flavor to salads, notably the Caesar salad, as an accompaniment to soups, or eaten as a snack food. The word crouton is derived from the French croûton, itself derived from croûte,...

s, bacon

Bacon

Bacon is a cured meat prepared from a pig. It is first cured using large quantities of salt, either in a brine or in a dry packing; the result is fresh bacon . Fresh bacon may then be further dried for weeks or months in cold air, boiled, or smoked. Fresh and dried bacon must be cooked before eating...

 bits, shredded cheese

Cheese

Cheese is a generic term for a diverse group of milk-based food products. Cheese is produced throughout the world in wide-ranging flavors, textures, and forms....

, and various types of salad dressing. Some salad bars also have additional food items such as cooked cold meats (e.g., chicken and ham), cooked beans (e.g., chick peas or kidney beans), deviled egg

Deviled egg

Deviled eggs or eggs mimosa are hard-boiled eggs cut in half and filled with the hard-boiled egg's yolk mixed usually with mayonnaise and mustard. Deviled eggs are usually served cold...

s, cold pasta salad

Pasta Salad

Pasta salad is a dish prepared with one or more types of pasta, usually chilled, and most often tossed in a vinegar, oil or mayonnaise-based dressing. It is typically served as an appetizer or a main course....

s, corn chips, bread rolls, soup, and fresh cut fruit slices.

History

There is a dispute over which restaurant first introduced the salad bar. A 1951 Yellow Pages

Yellow Pages

Yellow Pages refers to a telephone directory of businesses, organized by category, rather than alphabetically by business name and in which advertising is sold. As the name suggests, such directories were originally printed on yellow paper, as opposed to white pages for non-commercial listings...

 listing refers to the "salad bar buffet" at Springfield, Illinois

Springfield, Illinois

Springfield is the third and current capital of the US state of Illinois and the county seat of Sangamon County with a population of 117,400 , making it the sixth most populated city in the state and the second most populated Illinois city outside of the Chicago Metropolitan Area...

 restaurant The Cliffs. Hawaiian restaurant Chuck's Steak House claims to have had the first salad bar in the 1960s. Rax Restaurants

Rax Restaurants

Rax Roast Beef is a small regional U.S. fast food restaurant chain specializing in roast beef sandwiches, currently based in Ironton, Ohio. Once a big player in the fast food segment, Rax has extensively scaled down their operations since their peak in the 1980s...

 – a Midwestern

Midwestern United States

The Midwestern United States is one of the four U.S. geographic regions defined by the United States Census Bureau, providing an official definition of the American Midwest....

 fast food chain similar to Arby's

Arby's

Arby's is a fast food restaurant chain in the United States and Canada. Roark Capital Group owns 81.5% of the company, with Wendy's Company owning the other 18.5%. It is primarily known for selling roast beef sandwiches and curly fries. The Arby's menu also includes chicken sandwiches, appetizers,...

 – claims to have pioneered the salad bar in the mid-1960s. The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

claims that salad bars first began appearing in the late 1960s "in midprice restaurants like Steak and Ale, featuring bona fide salad fixings to keep customers busy and happy until the real food came." Restaurant entrepreneur Norman Brinker has been credited with inventing and popularizing the salad bar.

In the 1970s, Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises

Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises

Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises is a group of approximately 70 restaurants founded by Rich Melman and Jerry A. Orzoff in Chicago, IL in 1971.-History:The first restaurant was R.J...

 was based on salad bar-style food. In the early 1970s, Rich Melman

Rich Melman

Rich Melman is the founder of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, a privately held restaurant company with more than 70 venues. Melman serves as Chairman of the Board of LEYE. He creates restaurant concepts. As such he is a corporate executive who sees himself as an artist.In 1971, Melman and...

's Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

 restaurant and singles bar R. J. Grunts featured an all-you-can-eat salad bar with over 40 items.
The Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition, claims that the term originated in about 1973. Fitness

Physical fitness

Physical fitness comprises two related concepts: general fitness , and specific fitness...

 expert Richard Simmons

Richard Simmons

Milton Teagle Simmons , known professionally as Richard Simmons, is an American fitness personality who promotes weight-loss programs, most famously through his Sweatin' to the Oldies line of aerobics videos and DVDs and is known for his eccentric, outgoing and frequently flamboyant personality...

 opened a restaurant devoted exclusively to salads called Ruffage as a complement to his exercise business. It later closed.

Types of salad bars

Customers pay for either "all-you-can-eat" salad bar, a single serving, or by weight.

Many supermarket

Supermarket

A supermarket, a form of grocery store, is a self-service store offering a wide variety of food and household merchandise, organized into departments...

s also include a salad bar (at which customers pay for by weight) in the produce

Produce

Produce is a generalized term for a group of farm-produced goods and, not limited to fruits and vegetables . More specifically, the term "produce" often implies that the products are fresh and generally in the same state as where they were harvested. In supermarkets the term is also used to refer...

 or delicatessen

Delicatessen

Delicatessen is a term meaning "delicacies" or "fine foods". The word entered English via German,with the old German spelling , plural of Delikatesse "delicacy", ultimately from Latin delicatus....

section.