TASTE: Waldorf salad at the Waldorf Astoria

“Lunch for one? Any special occasion?” inquired the hostess at Peacock Alley at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. “I’m just here to try the Waldorf salad,” I said. “I live in New York, but I’ve never tried it.” I gave her one of those knowing New Yorker in-group eyebrow raises, a chauvinistic effort to distinguish myself from the tourists. She nodded. “As well you should.” She whisked me over to a corner table with a panoramic view of Peacock Alley. A waiter approached, looking not unlike a peacock himself, in a turquoise turtleneck and a contrasting royal blue suit. “Welcome, Ms. Van Dusen,” he said, invoking my name as if from the ether. “Any special occasion?” “I’m just here to try the Waldorf salad,” I replied. “As well you should,” he said.

Peacock Alley, the Art Deco, palm-tree-lined hotel promenade, is so named because guests once “peacocked” through it in their finest plumage. The original alley joined the Waldorf and the Astoria hotels, which were built side by side, at their former location on Fifth Avenue, as pawns in a family feud. Initially, the two hotel names were joined not by a hyphen but by an equal-sign, which connoted this transitional space. When the hotel relocated to Park Avenue in the early 1930s, a new Peacock Alley was constructed there as a tribute; the entire hotel was renovated and reopened in 2025. At 3 p.m. on a weekday, the reigning finery seemed to be polo shirts and Dockers, but my table did have a backdrop of a peacock-like chandelier, fanning its crystal-studded feathers.

The Waldorf salad was concocted in 1893 by maître d’hotel Oscar Tschirky to celebrate the opening of the Waldorf Hotel (pre–Astor family feud) and published in The Cookbook by “Oscar” of the Waldorf. Conceived during the heydey of cold, sweet salads, it is usually composed of slivered apples, grapes, walnuts, celery, lettuce, and cheddar cheese in a mayonnaise-based dressing. Oscar’s own original three-sentence recipe, however, called for only apples, celery, and “a good mayonnaise”—with a stern warning about the threat of “seeds of the apples.” The recipe has countless iterations, some involving marshmallows, raisins, hard-boiled eggs, and even a whipped-cream dressing. As someone who is wary of mayonnaise, I was hoping today’s salad might employ more of an “aioli,” a step above Hellman’s, elevating this rather middlebrow salad to Peacock Alley dignity.

As I waited, I sipped the most decadent iced tea I have ever beheld, served in a cut-crystal glass with a cut-crystal pitcher of simple syrup, a stirring spoon, and a linen cocktail napkin embossed with the Peacock Alley logo. At the table in front of me, a father and his teen son discussed the Nuremberg Trials. At the adjacent table, the hostess compared notes with a local couple on which part of the Upper West Side is the most “chill.”

After about twenty minutes, the turquoise-suited waiter leaned in to apologize for the delay in my Waldorf salad, mumbling something about “an investigation.” “A what?” I asked. He shuffled off with a dismissive wave, skittering back to slide two dishes of bar snacks onto my table, warning, “Be careful—they are very addictive!”

As I watched the crystals of the peacock chandelier throw a confetti of sparkles onto the tabletop, my salad at last emerged from the kitchen, a beautiful tangle of ingredients, not unlike a glamorous woman’s updo created with a few twists of a wrist and no mirror. It included matchsticks of tart-sweet apple, red grapes that seemed, improbably, to have been sliced into eighths, a tangle of watercress, a dusting of translucent grated cheddar, the raspy zing of celery crescents, and the salty-sweet crunch of candied walnuts, all slicked in a veneer of, yes, thin mayonnaise, set on a bed of chopped lettuce.

The effect was one of orderly chaos. Each bite contained a flurry of textures: a crunch of apple and pop of grape, a tickly, sour wriggle of watercress stems and the buttery bite of the walnuts. Once I reached the bottom of the bowl, I discovered a hidden layer of rubbery cheddar cheese nubbins, like mosaic tiles lining a pool.

As I stabbed at the julienned apples, trying to impale just the right number between the tines of my fork to consititute a gracious bite, I looked around at my fellow patrons: a family passing around a baby, a trio of chattering Chinese women, two gaunt, elderly ladies-who-lunch in Chanel suits digging into desserts and gazing guiltily around, silver-haired businessmen elbowing one another, and a young couple in sweatshirts and jeans drinking martinis. The decor of Peacock Alley is heavy on nymphs: playing flutes, frolicking in frescoes, and in bas relief on the elevator doors, where a buff naiad swooned over a pan flute (or was she nibbling on a flight of apple matchsticks?).

At the center of the space is a nine-foot-tall bronze-and-mahogany clock tower, a gift from Queen Victoria to America at the 1893 World’s Fair. It depicts an American president on each of its eight facades, along with images of various American industries. Much like the clock in Grand Central Terminal, it is an iconic New York meeting place.

Off to one side of the clock is the piano of Cole Porter, arguably the most famous long-term resident of the hotel.

I noticed a man, who appeared to be a guest, wearing inside-out track pants that were falling down his backside, fumbling with his suitcase and a Bloomingdale’s Big Brown Bag whose bottom had burst. A bottle of Snapple broke free from the bag and rolled beneath Cole Porter’s piano. Looking defeated, he hiked up his pants, glanced around the room, plucked up the bottle from the piano’s shadow, stuffed it into the top of the bag, and hustled out of the alley past a trio of twentysomethings in strappy dresses. Perhaps the 2026 Peacock Alley is—not unlike its most famous long-term salad resident—a place where the high and the low can commingle, if not seamlessly, then with a certain structure that lends it a lasting charm.