Sweetgreen Limited-Time Tiger Bowl

I was excited about the collaboration between Sweetgreen and Danny Bowien's Mission Chinese Food on the Tiger Bowl. It's available for a limited time from now until Jan. 3, 2018 only at NYC Sweetgreen locations, and the ingredients sounded pretty good.

The Tiger Bowl is a warm salad with organic spinach, organic wild rice, roasted sesame tofu, kimchi, shiso, carrots, cucumbers, pears, spicy sunflower seeds, nori furikake, tiger dressing. No details on the dressing ingredients but photos on Sweetgreen's site would suggest it has some red chili pepper. It costs $12.15, which is on the higher end of their prices.

Image: Sweetgreen

The Tiger Bowl version that I got could have been great. Unfortunately, all the ingredients were severely overpowered by the extremely sour vegetable pickle that Sweetgreen tries to pass off as kimchi. Instead of kimchi, I got a pink-hued mix of napa, radish, & sliced carrots heavily pickled in red wine vinegar that assaulted my taste buds. There was no spicy red chili that kimchi tends to have. I like pickles & sour things. But this was a very sour jardiniere. And it's wrong because someone who hasn't had kimchi will get a very wrong idea of what kimchi really is. I pushed the pickled veggies aside and tried to salvage the rest of the salad, but their acidic, sour juice was everywhere.

My Tiger Bowl order

Pink pickled vegetables as so-called "kimchi"

I also tasted a lot of black pepper. It seemed like that was the only spicy heat element in the bowl. No flavor or heat of red chili peppers. There was no shiso either.

I stopped by Sweetgreen on 75th & Amsterdam on Nov. 2, the first day the new bowl was available, and that may have been a mistake. I wonder if this location had all the right ingredients yet to make the Tiger Bowl. Maybe this is just wishful thinking. But I don't plan to give the salad another try to find out.

I usually like Sweetgreen salads & bowls, but this was a big disappointment. I can't believe what I got is what Danny Bowien imagined or that he approved the recipes.

My Rating (out of 5): 1

Sweetgreen
311 Amsterdam Ave
New York, NY 10023
www.sweetgreen.com