Jeff Van Geest painstakingly plates deep red and yellow beets in the kitchen of Diva at the Met. Beets are sturdy-looking root vegetables, but after he arranges the slices on a rectangular white dish, they look delicate and pretty.

We’re here to chat with Van Geest, Diva’s executive sous chef, about salads and to get some inspiration for summer cooking.

Van Geest explains that Diva (645 Howe Street) has a green salad and a composed salad on its dinner menu: one feminine and the other masculine. Come again? “I know that it’s a little stereotypical, but feminine being a little more delicate, with lighter flavours and cleaner tasting, and the masculine being fuller flavoured,” he says. His Hannah Brook Farm mixed greens, with hearty kales and mustard greens, is the more macho one. Surprisingly, it’s the beet salad that wins the Miss Congeniality award for its understated flavours.

Local organic beets are roasted whole with lemon peel, garlic cloves, rosemary, and olive oil, and are then tossed in a lemon vinaigrette. Van Geest paints a smear of reduced beet juice down the plate with Picasso-like flair. He lops off the tops of baby beets and places a few of the tops, roots sticking up, on the plate. Golden yellow beet wedges lie in between the red baby beets for colour and flavour contrast.

Then the plate gets really interesting. Van Geest sprinkles granola spiced with mustard seed, fennel seed, and rosemary around the beets. And out comes the whipped cream canister, from which he pumps out mounds of lemon espuma, a foam made from preserved lemon tea, gelatin, and carbon dioxide.

The final touches are a dusting of dehydrated beet powder, dots of rosemary oil, paper-thin rounds of Chioggia beets, and microgreens. The visual focal point is a finger of organic goat yogurt, frozen and then panko-breaded and deep-fried before being placed in the centre of the dish.

As Van Geest explains, the salad is “kind of organized chaos”. The look is strikingly modern, yet the tastes are simple and coherent. The sweetness of the beets plays off the lightness of the espuma. And the granola and crispy molten yogurt add textures that work alongside the firmness of the beets.

Franco Felice, owner of Il Nido (780 Thurlow Street), offers a simple, refreshing salad that also pays attention to balance and contrast. He recommends getting to know the flavour profiles of your greens. With his Il Nido salad, he takes a popular combination in Italy—peppery arugula, bitter endive, and crisp, peppery radish—and picks other ingredients that complement these flavours and textures. Pears poached in cinnamon, cloves, black pepper, sugar, and water provide sweetness, while goat cheese coated in crushed cashews gives a layer of creamy crunch.

Felice almost sighs with pleasure as he talks about his tarragon dressing over the phone: “I love tarragon, and the smell and taste of it,” he says. For an emulsion, he recommends the standard three parts oil to one part vinegar, but he adds that you need to adjust the ratio to taste. The one at his restaurant contains olive oil, vegetable oil, tarragon-infused vinegar, lemon juice, mustard, capers, parsley, salt, and pepper. He also adds chopped fresh tarragon to the dressing and leaves it to sit for a day before he strains the herb out. What’s left is a clean, citrus-y flavour that balances the rest of the salad.

A salad survey wouldn’t be complete without a classic French bistro version. Don Letendre, executive chef at Elixir (350 Davie Street), has taken his kitchen back to basics with a “warm frisée and bacon salad with a soft-poached egg” that works year-round but feels especially right on a serene summer’s night on the restaurant’s below-street-level patio. “It’s real food. It’s just a nice way of eating a salad,” he says during a phone chat.

Letendre cuts up double-smoked bacon and tosses the cooked lardons with frisée and watercress. Then, with typical French resourcefulness, he uses the reserved bacon fat to crank up the flavours in a dressing of sherry vinegar, tarragon, honey, mustard, shallots, and olive oil. Croutons made from brioche add another level of richness as the bread’s buttery flavour is heightened with toasting. (For the recipe, click here.)

The last ingredient is a warm poached egg that wilts the greens and softens their bitterness. Part of the enjoyment of eating the salad is puncturing the yolk and watching it spill out to become part of the dressing. You’ll find yourself scraping the plate with your fork to get every last bit of eggy goodness.