made nice.
I! Finally! Made! It! To! Made! Nice!
It has been a year, and it seems like they’ve done some retooling, but last week my mom and I had a decent dinner at Made Nice.
By both choice and circumstance, I’ve essentially been on a 70% vegetarian diet for the past seven months. Meat is expensive, and I’m trying to reduce my impact. Now, if I do have protein, I experiment with salmon that I cook at home or I get chicken when I’m at a fast casual place like Dig Inn or Cava. I don’t really miss meat too much, but I want to be sure that if I eat chicken it’s responsibly sourced. (There’s a whole Ezra Klein Podcast episode on it that I recommend you listen to.)
All this is to say that Made Nice focuses on salads, but chicken is really their “thing.” I got the frisee and rosti salad with chicken breast and my mom got the Kale avocado with chicken breast as well. (I think I should’ve gone with the smoked salmon, but it was $7, and the chicken was $5 and I went into panic mode and just ordered the cheaper item.) The chicken itself was fine. It was a small portion, but I guess $5 only goes so far. I did like the buttermilk dressing, and the rosti “croutons,” aka square tater tots, were excellent. My mom was a little underwhelmed with hers, but again, it was just salad, so it’s not like we were expecting Julia Child’s ghost to magically materialize and bless us all or anything.
The one thing we didn’t try was the soft serve. And if there’s a constant in my life, it’s my enduring love of soft serve. I have plans to hit this place up again strictly to try the fro yo, but I think it can wait as Mister Dips has been calling my name for some time now.
On a semi-related note, the rise of fast casual dining has fascinated me on an existential level. Both because it’s both extremely convenient (and surprisingly easy on my social anxiety to be a single person and just get a solo dinner at a fast casual place) and the right amount of mid-brow (or just “brow”?) to usually justify the price. But that’s a longer essay about affordability, sustainability, and access for a later time. However, it comes to mind as it is of a piece with the idea of the guys from EMP charging almost $40 for two salads and two bottles of water (I didn’t notice they had a water tap until after we bought them! let me live!! I compost and recycle!!!). Tangents aside, if you find yourself in Nomad and don’t want to spend $94 for the whole roasted bird at the hotel restaurant, you could get a pot pie for $14 at Made Nice. But seriously, the rosti croutons were legit.
