Choose Salad Or Burger At Chili's?

It's happened to everyone at one time or another: You're at a casual dining restaurant, you open the menu and instantly the battle begins between your diet and your longing for big food. Sure, the salads sound tasty enough, but the pictures of the burgers make your mouth water and your stomach growl.

But the last time you got on the scale, the news wasn't good. Your doctor's after you about everything from your triglycerides to your oily skin. Your significant other has been making pointed comments about how you seem to be taking up more space on the couch.

So there's your dilemma. Do you virtuously order a salad and enjoy the feeling of having hewn to the straight and narrow, or do you go for the gusto and get the Monster Bacon Fatburger?

Your quest for healthy eating is helped by the fact that salads have evolved along with American tastes. Where the "grilled chicken salad" on menus of the past were nothing but flavorless meat piled atop iceberg lettuce, today you'll find a vast array of flavors from spicy to sweet, from Asian to Tex-Mex. The dressings have kept pace, too, with yesterday's light ranch or other characterless goo replaced with vinaigrettes and other mixtures that reflect their genres.

Unfortunately for your waistline, burgers have evolved just as quickly as their greener menu-mates. The bacon is now thick-cut and applewood-smoked. The cheese is now aged cheddar, spicy pepperjack or any one a broad range of other offerings. The buns are custom-made, and you'll even find odd flavors like ancho chile showing up in the mayonnaise.

So the battle lines are drawn. Today's kicked-up salads face off with today's overstuffed burgers, and you're in the middle.

In this first showdown between the light and dark of your dietary wishes, we'll take a look at Chili's Grill and Bar, which could fairly be said to have invented the concept of casual dining in chain form.

In the salad corner, we have the Mesquite Chicken Salad, which comes with the aforementioned applewood smoked bacon, as well as cheddar cheese, pico de gallo, corn relish, cilantro, crispy tortilla strips and a touch of barbecue sauce. The standard dressing with it is ranch.

Nutrition facts: 1,010 calories, 63 grams fat, 2,830 mg sodium, 45 grams carbs. No cholesterol information given.

In the burger corner is a burger whose very name strikes fear in the hearts of cardiologists everywhere: the Smokehouse Bacon Triple-The-Cheese Burger. According to the menu, this one comes with extra-thick applewood bacon, smoked cheddar, Swiss, provolone, sauteed onions, veggies and jalapeño ranch dressing. Nutrition facts: 1,720 calories, 122 grams fat, 3,810 mg sodium, 62 grams carbs.

As you can see, the salad is lighter than the burger, but it's not lean and mean by any stretch of the imagination. And the sodium count -- largely thanks to the bacon -- is very high.

The burger, however, is a nutritional nightmare. It's got nearly double a full day's recommended fat intake (based on a 2,000-calorie intake) and roughly 150 percent of your recommended sodium.

So we're not dealing with health food in either case. How do they taste?

The burger was completely drowned by the toppings. It may as well not have been present at all, really. The cheese was very nicely melted, but the flavor of the smoked cheddar overpowered the other two milder cheeses. The "extra thick" bacon was good, but biting through it required so much force that the burger threatened to explode. It was definitely a messy, two-handed, multi-napkin affair. The bun was a standard issue sesame-seed, but very fresh and tender.

With all that going on, the jalapeño ranch dressing would have to be heavy on the peppers to make any impact. Sadly, it wasn't.

The salad was a much better offering. The bacon set off the chicken nicely, there wasn't too much cheese and the pico de gallo had some real kick. The corn relish provided a good sweet counterpoint to the pico. The cilantro mentioned in the menu description didn't show up on palate, making for the only serious taste demerit.

This one was almost too easy. Save your burger indulgence for another time and go for the salad. You'll save yourself 700 calories, 59 grams of fat and the feeling that you've somehow managed to eat an entire brick for lunch.