Luckly, living here in West Bay, it's easy for me to find a great salad bar. I just head over to Conte's. Or, at least, I used to head over to Conte's -- the restaurant just changed hands and as far as I've heard, there's no plan to continue their upscale saladbar. Gone is the salad bar where I can make a real Greek salad out of the ingredients sitting right there -- feta cheese... anchovies... oiled olives... ingredients that I'll never find in the salad bar at Hometown Buffet.

So, if Conte's salad bar goes away, I still have other options.

One of my great discoveries is the salad bar at Appetite's in Coventry on Route 3. It's a great option if you're on a tight budget. Don't know Appetite's? It's a diner of sorts, the kind you'd normally expect to find at a truck stop. Maybe it was a truck stop in an earlier age. Food is quick and filling. Not fancy. But inexpensive. Their salad bar has the traditional lettuce and tomatoes. Not much else, but it is an all-you-can-eat salad bar. Order liver and onions or maybe spaghetti, and use the salad bar to round off the meal. When you're done, you'll still have change left over.

Another option is Ruby Tuesday. Their sald bar is a centerpiece of their dining experience. They pay a high level of attention to the salad bar, which includes most of the common ingredients for the green salads you'd expect on a salad bar. They also have nice potato and pasta salads at the far end of the line. The salad bar is a bit expensive all by itself, and considering that their standard meals are enough on their own, it's hard to choose to go with a salad or add it to a meal. The best solution is to get either a baked potato or bowl of soup with the salad bar, making a great meal and a reasonable price.

There is, by the way, a Ruby Tuesday in East Greenwich, a nice place now that smoking has been banned in East Greenwich restaurants. There is also another in Middletown, a somewhat larger restauant but a very similar salad bar.

A recent addition to the list of salad bar options is Atwood Grill. Their salad bar is an inexpensive add-on to their long list of entrees, and while the selection of ingredients doesn't quite match what I came to respect at Conte's, they do include more interesting ingredients than Ruby Tuesday. After visiting Atwood Grill in both Johnston and Warwick, I recommend their salad bar to help fill the restaurant's long entree preparation time.

On top of that, there are salad bars of a sort at most of the Asian mega-buffets in the area, and a decent salad bar at the Hometown Buffet. But when I go there, I'm tempted by the hot food and tend to neglect green leafies and crispy roughage. But even with those options available, I usually look for a salad bar. I'm beginning to think that maybe a salad bar craving is a cross between being really really hungry and the fear of having 20,000 calories in a single meal.

So even if Conte's never comes back as my primary salad bar option, at least I have other choices when a craving for mass quantities of salad strike. And strike it does.

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