How a kale salad became one of this Durham pizza spot’s iconic dishes
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Kale salad has been on Toro's menu daily since 2012.
- Brooks created it in Seattle; Toro's version is massaged kale with lemon, parm and chilis.
- Toro's beloved kale salad is a standout as the restaurant earns regional recognition.
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Somehow, for more than a decade, one of the most popular, raved-about, obsessed over and beloved dishes in Durham is the kale salad at Pizzeria Toro.
Yes, a kale salad. Owner Gray Brooks isn’t all that surprised.
“Number one is, it’s delicious and it’s kale,” Brooks said.
In our great collective embrace of kale, a tough and bitter green, we’ve added it to smoothies and stews, subbed it into salads as an even healthier option than something that’s already pretty healthy.
This went on and on, past parody and irony. Now in 2026, it feels like we’ve reached a post-kale era.
Still, everyone orders the Toro kale salad.
“Kale is in the middle of a very long moment,” Brooks said. “It’s an insanely healthy green; (the kale salad) is one of those things that makes you that feels kind of decadent and healthy at the same time.”
The kale salad’s origins
Brooks first created the kale salad while working as a chef at Tom Douglas’ Serious Pie in Seattle. One day during a shift he found a fairly bare walk-in cooler and knew there needed to be more than just a couple dishes on the menu. The kale was meant for a soup, but instead Brooks threw it together as a kind of classic Tuscan kale salad. It remains on the menu to this day.
“It was literally originally just supposed to be something for the day, just to have more than two things on the menu to get through that day,” Brooks said. “And it just took off. People just loved it, and they kept eating it and they kept asking for it. So I stayed on the menu.”
When he moved back to Durham to open Pizzeria Toro, the salad was on the menu from day one, with Douglas’ blessing. The salad has been on the menu every day since 2012.
The pizzas are undeniably the star at Toro, baked in a ripping hot wood-burning oven until the crusts are dappled with char, and the cheese has relaxed and melted into molten ecstasy.
How the kale salad is made
But the kale salad is equally adored, not as a healthy foil or a token salad, but because it is silly delicious — a kind of bitter magic, softened by literal massages and lemon juice, seasoned with a healthy amount of salt and parmesan and jolted with a note of hot peppers. The salad at Toro is made in batches and left to marinate for at least an hour. The kale is torn by hand and massaged with sea salt so the tough leaves begin to wilt, then dressed with lemon juice, olive oil and grated parmesan. When it’s plated, cooks add pine nuts, spicy calabrian chilis and more cheese, so it arrives at the table with peaks of shaved parmesan.
“So this salad is actually in the good for you category, but tastes like it’s in the bad for you category,” Brooks said.
Pizzeria Toro, at 105 E. Chapel Hill St. in Durham, was named to The News & Observer’s Top 50 restaurants in the Triangle this spring.
This story was originally published April 8, 2026 at 7:37 AM with the headline "How a kale salad became one of this Durham pizza spot’s iconic dishes."
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