Kale Salad, the Best Houston's Emerald Kale Salad Dupe

This Kale Salad with Roasted Peanut Vinaigrette inspired by the Emerald Kale and Rotisserie Chicken Salad at Houston's restaurants, is a near perfect copycat, but I made a few adjustments to better suit an anti-inflammatory lifestyle and my "pack-as-many-nutrients-into-it" philosophy. Shall we?

^{originally published February 2007, updated January 2025}

What is Houston's Emerald Kale Salad? | Ingredients | What Kind of Kale Best for Salad? | How to Make Houston's Kale Salad Dupe | Is Houston's Kale Salad Healthy?

Is this Houston's Emerald Kale Salad Copycat?

How do you improve upon the perfection that is the Emerald Kale Salad at Houston's—nutrient-dense kale, crisp cabbage, bright fresh herbs, and of course that absolutely drinkable crunchy Roasted Peanut Vinaigrette? You don't, really, other than actually figuring out how to make it at home and of course most importantly, replacing the worst ingredient, cilantro, with parsley.

Ingredients You Need for Houston's Kale Salad

These are the ingredients you need for this Houston's Kale Salad dupe recipe:

• Kale, obviously!
• Green cabbage
• Green onions
• Fresh mint and parsley
• Peanuts
• Parmesan Cheese
• Chicken, cooked and shredded

And for the Roasted Peanut Vinaigrette

• Rice vinegar, 2 tablespoons 
• Lemon juice, 2 tablespoons
• Avocado oil, 2 tablespoons
• Peanut butter, 2 tablespoon
• Maple syrup, 1 tablespoon
• Garlic, 1 clove
• Sea salt, 1 teaspoon
• Red pepper powder, ¼ teaspoon

What is the Best Kind of Kale for Salad?

Green, curly kale is the one I use in this recipe, and the one in Houston's version.

However, any type of kale—curly green, lacinato, red—works for this salad, and the nutritional profiles across the types are generally fairly similar. Some varieties are milder in flavor than others, but in this kale salad recipe, the differences are not noticeable because of the flavors of the other ingredients, namely the dressing.

The Kale Salad in these photos is made with "curly" kale, which is a lighter, brighter green with the ruffled edges, makes the salad a brighter, slightly more vibrant green.

To be honest though, I usually prefer the darker green lacinato/Tuscan/dinosaur kale, which has long skinny, "bumpy" leaves. The reason I generally prefer this kind of kale in cooking applications is that it's just easier to wash. Sometimes you gotta just go with practicality.

Baby kale has the mildest flavor and tbh, I could eat this version of kale in a salad.

Additional Ingredients Notes and Resources

Cabbage. This salad uses your standard everyday green cabbage, which is so underrated as a vegetable and a salad base imho. However, use whatever cabbage you have or prefer, like napa cabbage and even purple cabbage.

Peanuts. Use roasted, salted peanuts. Roasting amplifies the umami of the peanuts, and also makes them crunchy. Any other roasted salted nut that you like—almonds, cashews, walnuts—will work here.

Parmesan cheese. I buy intact blocks of Parmigianno-reggiano cheese and shred or grate it myself so I can be sure that I am getting only cheese with no other additives or fillers. You can always buy pre-shredded or grated parmesan. The grated parmesan in green canisters on shelves is not ideal and if that's your only option, it's better to leave the cheese out.

Dressing Ingredients Notes

Rice Vinegar. I use this brand organic brown rice vinegar. If you don't have rice vinegar, use any other light/mild vinegar like apple cider vinegar or white wine vinegar.

Avocado oil. I use this Avocado Oil as my every day neutral-flavored cooking oil. If you don't have avocado oil, use olive oil, though olive oil has quite a distinctive flavor.

Peanut butter. For the best texture, use creamy peanut butter, preferably with no salt and no sugar added so you can add the salt and sweetness yourself. The brand I used in these photos is this organic one.

Maple Syrup. I use this organic maple syrup . You can substitute with other sweetener of choice. Though still "sugar," maple syrup has a lower glycemic index (GI) than white sugar, may provide antioxidant benefits from naturally occurring phenols, and because it tastes sweeter than refined white sugar, you can use a little less in certain recipes like this one. (source)

Red pepper powder. I use gochugaru, a Korean red pepper powder with an earthy flavor and a medium spicy heat, mostly because that's what I have the most of and sits right on my countertop. You can use Italian crushed red pepper flakes, cayenne pepper, and even a spicy paprika.

Salt. Salt is an obvious and ubiquitous ingredient. I use this Kosher salt.

Green onions, parsley, mint and any other fresh produce from either the Santa Monica Farmers' Market on Wednesday, Mar Vista Farmers Market on Sunday, or Whole Foods Market when I can't find what I need at the farmers' market.

How Much Kale is in 1 Bunch?

Because kale come in so many different sizes and shapes like so many um, other things, it's better to "measure" kale by weight, not by "bunch." However, grocery stores don't sell kale by weight, and people don't buy kale by weight either.

According to research, one average bunch of kale weighs about ½ pound, and yields about 6 cups of firmly packed chopped kale. So you need a total of 1 bunch of kale for this salad.

You will more than likely become hyper-fixated/obsessed/addicted to the Kale White Bean Salad though, so it's better to go over and have leftovers!

Instructions for How to Make Houston's Emerald Kale Salad Dupe

The hardest step in making this salad is washing the kale. I'm not kidding. Otherwise, like most salads, there isn't much to the actual recipe than placing all the ingredients in a large bowl, drizzling with the dressing, and tossing until everything is well coated.

HOWEVER. As easy as any salad recipe is, there are a few tips and tricks along the way that will make this, or any, salad, the best salad of your life.

Pro Tips and Techniques for Houston's Emerald Kale Salad

1. Chop the kale as small as possible. One of the reasons you don't like eating kale salad is that it's hard to eat. We're going to fix that in two ways, the first of which is chopping the kale into the smallest pieces so you don't have to unhinge your jaw like a python to get a fistful of oversized airplane tarps into your mouth. Do I exaggerate to make a point? Yes, of course. Is it kind of true though? Also of course. Chop the kale small enough that you can eat it with a spoon. I'm serious.
2. Dress and massage the kale first. The second way we're making kale salad easy to eat is by massaging the tiny chopped kale—you did chop the kale into the tiniest of tiny pieces right?— with a few tablespoons of the dressing first. I used to cringe at the idea of "massaging kale" because I don't know why, but I totally get that physically breaking down the fibers in the leaves makes kale much much easier to eat.
3. Make double the amount of Emerald Kale Salad. If you make enough Emerald Kale Salad to eat now, it will be crisp and crunchy like a salad. If you make enough to save some for later, the salad will marinate in the dressing and become ever so lightly pickled and it will be another flavor dimension.

Health and Nutrition Benefits of Houston's Kale Salad

I am not a calorie counter. And you needn't be either. I am an anti-inflammation firefighter, so this recipe focuses on:

• anti-inflammatory ingredients
• nutrient-density

The brassicas, herbs, and dressing ingredients are high in phytonutrients that fight inflammation. The crunchy roasted salted peanuts are what makes the salad craveable so that you want to eat all those good things, and both the peanuts and peanut butter in the dressing are a source of fiber and plant-based protein.

Dietary Preferences/Restrictions

• Gluten-free. The Houston's Kale Salad recipe as written is gluten-free.
• Vegan. To make the salad vegan, leave out replace the Parmesan cheese with a plant-based parmesan cheese and replace the rotisserie chicken with a can of chickpeas.

Houston's Kale Salad Variations

I could eat this Houston's Kale Salad every day exactly as is, straight out of the enormous stainless steel mixing bowl I use to mix the salad. And with a spoon, of course! And thank God we can make it at home, because we aren't about wasting more than $20 every day in the restaurant.

The original reason we made this salad at home was to use extra rotisserie chicken we had from overzealously buying at everyone's favorite bulk store, but the salad works perfectly as a starter or side salad without the chicken. If you want to change up the protein, here are some tried and true faves:

• cooked or smoked wild salmon broken up right into the salad as you're mixing the other ingredients together
• canned tuna, added the same way as above
• eggs, medium-boiled and cut into quarters. Little bits of cooked yolk will mix with the dressing and make it ever so slightly creamy.
• chickpeas, for a plant-based protein boost
• pasta, add a chickpea or other protein-power pasta and turn the salad in to a pasta salad

You can also use the Roasted Peanut Vinaigrette by itself in other ways:

• use it on the Cabbage Apple Salad and add a handful of chopped roasted salted peanuts
• Mandarin Chicken Salad
• Soba Salad
• stir the Roasted Peanut Vinaigrette into hot, cooked grains or into pasta for a lighter in texture vs heavier cream- or mayo-based pasta salad
• toss the Roasted Peanut Vinaigrette with literally any other greens.

Best Kale Salads

If you go to the trouble of washing and chopping greens for the Emerald Salad, you might as well go the distance, and prep enough to make salads for several days. You can use those greens in these chopped salads:

• Kale Salad with Sesame Miso Dressing—Hillstone dupe, which is similar to Houston's, but different, iykyk
• Kale White Bean Salad, Erewhon Dupe
• Kale Tabbouleh Salad with Cherries
• Dill Pickle Chopped Salad with Kale and Cabbage
• Kale Caesar Salad with Avocado Caesar Dressing

How to Eat More Cruciferous Vegetables, not Just Kale

• Green Shakshuka with Kale
• Eggs Florentine with Kale
• Kale Slaw with Apple Cider Dressing
• Kale Pesto

Food for Afterthought

Every year around this time, something weird happens to me. It’s a strange sensation, an odd feeling on which I can’t totally put my perfectly French manicured finger.

Normally, I am a fanstasmagical fairy who gracefully juggles multiple competing priorities, but I can’t seem to focus enough to hold up one single thing. I drop stuff; I bump into walls; I forget appointments; I leave things behind and lose them; I become slightly off center. Unbalanced. A lot of people say the same things about….being in love.

oooOOOoooh. Right. Well, wrong, but that does remind me...

Then I look at the calendar and realize what time of the year it is. What time of the month it is. It’s that time, and unfortunately, we're not talking about Miller. It’s early February, which leads to the beginning of mid-February, and since February is a short month with 28 days, the middle of February is neither half of 30 days, which is the 15th nor half of 31 days, which is the cusp of the 15th and 16th, but is half of 28, which is the 14th. There is something about February 14th, the dead center of the month.

Dead.

Center.

It’s payday!

Unless, of course, you are paid bi-weekly, which is every two weeks, instead of semi-monthly which is twice a month, which never made sense to me because aren’t they the exact same effin' thing?!?!

Galentine's

What it is that I really feel is not unbalancementedness, nor is it a desire to manufacture brand new words because I have a limited vocabulary of my own; it is stress. I feel this underwhelmingly overwhelming pressure to perform, and not just perform, but perform in accordance with the standard operating procedure for Valentine’s Day. I have Valentine’s Day performance anxiety. Make royally painfully iced heart-shaped sugar cookies. Bake red velvet cupcakes. Write love letters. Make dinner. Make reservations. Take long sips of sparkling rosé and seduce you like the alarmingly charming siren that I am. In my head.

Easy. I mean, seriously. Drink sparkling rosé?

No, you see, the real performance is here. The Delicious Life. I am expected to compose a brilliantly biting, sarcastic, witty, clever, well-thought-out, thematically unified piece about how much I H-A-T-E Valentine’s Day, spew bitterness about past loves lost, about present loves absent, and future loves impossible, flood my post’s paragraphs with brilliant business analysis about how the Holiday Hell Council composed of the DeBeers, Godiva, and FTD trifecta built an outstanding marketing strategy to frighten men into wild, wasteful spending on a single day. I have to make scathing social commentary on commercialization, capitalization, and punctuation, which is all just a thinly veiled attempt at hiding how much I really just want to be romanced out of my mind…because being a bitter young maid on Valentine’s Day is more fun than a stupid silly sighing fool.

Anxious Avoidant

However, and this is a huge “however,” the pressure for high-performance Valentine’s Day writing is purely a figment of my imagination. I don’t “have to” do anything! This is a blog. It’s my blog, for fox ache. I don’t even get paid. Pressure comes from nowhere else except the tiny little editor who is sitting inside my own gorgeous head. Though I seem to think of myself as a mostly rational, logical, and completely sane person, I have very little control over this teeny tiny-but-powerful pearlescent chip embedded in my psyche that actively seeks out melodramatic, high-intensity stress. There is a stress-seeking missile in my brain that wants to explode back at “The Editor” and really, it’s all evidence that I have a massive fear of being a disappointment.

So rather than dealing with the possibility of failing at Valentine's Day, I’m going to do the mature thing. I’m going to avoid it! Instead, let me tell you about why it is absolutely certain that I will likely still have a chance to write all of that on Valentine’s Day anyway. I will be at home on Valentine’s Day instead of out with some unnamed hot suitor because for some ungodly reason, suitors who come through into my Delicious Life are real winners like one whom I shall call Mr. Awesome, not because he is awesome, but because, well, you'll see.

Reason #1 Why Sarah Will Not be Out with Mr. Awesome on Valentine's Day, or Any Other Day For That Matter

When we got into his car to drive to dinner, he asked me what kind of car I drive. For several reasons, this irritated me on the inside (but not on the outside! I still had to eat dinner!).

Does it matter what kind of car I drive? No. Is it that either 1) I don't drive a car that is good enough or 2) I don’t drive a car that is better than his? What the fuck is a “better” car anyway? Am I supposed to be impressed with his car?

Cars do not impress me, and his car was not any car that would impress me to begin with anyway. So really, he has no right to ask me anything. If he actually drove a goddamned Tesla Roadster, I would be impressed because a Tesla Roadster is an impressive car and it’s environmentally friendly. His question irritated me, my reaction irritated me even more, and I think that it was just leftover irritation from "Houston's."

I should have told him that I drive a Ferrari. But only when my driver is on vacation. Or maybe I should have told him I only take the Big Blue Bus because I don't go out much. Because I don't shower.

Reason #2 Why Sarah Will Not be Out with Mr. Awesome on Valentine's Day, or Any Other Day For That Matter

He told me an MBA is useless. Ouch. That one stung and I had to force myself to keep my lips clamped into a tight little line so that I wouldn’t start spewing out backwash-laced haterade on his precious little certification that isn’t even a degree, but a TLA (that's "three-letter-acronym" for the unvernacularized) that he can print on a homemade business card because paid a lot of money to take some tests.

Though I very often proclaim that I do not have a “list” of qualifying characteristics, education is actually on my phantom list because education is important to me. I may have been rejected from Stanfurd three times, but I’m still proud of my education, and any diss to my education is taken with a lot of offense. I know education is not synonymous with intelligence, but still, it symbolizes a commitment to something! Or something. At the same time, though, this is a hard one for me to argue because technically, I am in total agreement with his statement. An MBA is useless. However, only MBAs are allowed to make fun of their degrees. I never make fun of how utterly useless, and in fact, almost laughable, a JD is, do I?!?!

Reason #3 Why Sarah Will Not be Out with Mr. Awesome on Valentine's Day, or Any Other Day For That Matter

At the bar, he ordered a sugary sweet cocktail. It was pink. It wasn’t a Cosmo, but I swear its name was something like FruityPebbliciousMetrotini, with a Razberri Kiss. I ordered a Bourbon on the rocks and sucked it down in about 45 seconds, then ordered a second Butch-tini and took it to the table.

Lessons of the day?

Don’t stress about Valentine’s Day and don’t ever take Sarah to Houston’s and order a fucking salad.

(Incidentally, I went there for lunch recently and the food aside from the burger is unmistakably atrocious. Houston's has gone the way of Asian fusion, with a very heavy emphasis on the "ew" of fusion. Spicy tuna was rolled up with what tasted like coleslaw made with Miracle Whip. The vegetable of the day was curried cauliflower, and from about six feet away, it looked promising. When it arrived, the sadly over-steamed florets were drowning in a yellow sauce that tasted vaguely like French's mustard and garnished with the dregs from a can of Planters Mixed Nuts. I didn't even venture to try more than a bite of the Thai Steak Salad. The noodles in the bite that were in desperate need of a quick dunk in hot water to loosen them up.)