Bread Zeppelin rides chopped-salad wave
The trendiest salad appearing across social media lately doesn’t feature foraged ingredients from some lifestyle blogger’s backyard, an electric green goddess dressing claiming to be healthy or a “quick” recipe calling for two dozen ingredients.
It’s a chopped salad. A very chopped salad. Then it’s stuffed into a sandwich.
Bread Zeppelin, a fast-casual restaurant specializing in hollowed-out baguettes filled with various chopped salads, is one Houston restaurant benefiting from this TikTok trend, with millions of views on the platform. This seemingly mundane viral moment features countless videos of people cobbling together a bunch of ingredients on a cutting board and sometimes using cleavers or two knives to obliterate the salad ingredients. It’s not only in baguettes but hoagies, loaves of ciabatta and even bagels.
“I kept seeing food accounts on TikTok showing this salad like it was an ad,” said Aliza Runer, who was grabbing lunch at Bread Zeppelin on a recent afternoon. “It’s fun, but mostly it’s easier to eat.”
Bread Zeppelin started in Dallas — where there are currently seven locations in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex — before franchising in Houston in 2021. The original location in Spring is no longer open, but there is one in the Greenway Plaza area, at 3235 Southwest Freeway, tucked inside a strip center.
The restaurant’s lunch business has been steady since debuting last year, but the recent popularity of the chopped salad craze has also helped raise Bread Zeppelin’s profile, said Matt West, director of brand development at Avalanche Food Group, which is the franchisee.
Back in October, the salad chain’s local Instagram following was under 400 followers, but a video clip garnering more than 1 million views grew the restaurant’s account by thousands over the next two months, according to Sherrie Handrinos, a spokesperson for the Houston Bread Zeppelin.
Since January, the restaurant has seen interaction increase by 24% on Instagram, she added.
“I believe this truly happened — and trends continue to happen — because people eat with their eyes,” Handrinos said. “When they see something that looks amazing, it’s natural for us to want to try it.”
The allure of the chopped salad on TikTok can stem from watching someone shredding the ingredients, but for others, there’s an ick factor, with some on social media describing the salad as having a “pre-chewed” factor or simply wondering why it’s necessary to even present a salad like it’s baby food.
Bread Zeppelin has about a dozen different salads on its menu, including special flavors.
There’s a wall that looks like a greenhouse filled with different leafy greens like romaine, iceberg, spinach, kale and arugula. Customers can choose their salad and add on ingredients like crispy chickpeas, artichokes, corn, beets or olives along with proteins like chicken or tofu.
Each order can be served in a bowl or a baguette, known as a Zeppelin, a pun from the brand’s original founders who loved the rock band Led Zeppelin.
To prepare a Zeppelin, West explains, the tip of an 8-inch baguette is cut off and tongs are used to remove the core (those parts are used for croutons and bread pudding). It then goes through a 500 degree oven that moves like a conveyor belt for one minute and 20 seconds.
Customers can pick one of 16 different dressings for their salad before it’s stuffed into the baguette, which are made locally at Bread Man Baking Co.
“You get each ingredient in a single bite,” West said. “It’s our way of elevating salads.”
The boom of salad chains in recent years has targeted customers wanting to eat healthier while looking for quick options. In Houston alone, there are at least a half dozen chains from athleisure crowd favorite Sweetgreen to the drive-thru friendly Salad and Go.
Runer, a 22-year-old University of Houston student, ordered a Southwest Zeppelin — the brand’s top seller with a mix of avocado, tomatoes, corn, black beans, cotija cheese and romaine — because she wanted a taste of the TikTok trend.
“I’m too busy to cook,” she said. “But I’m also too lazy to make a chopped salad.”