Ever eat at Corner Bakery? If you’re cutting your salt, don’t

Life can have unexpected consequences sometimes. Since the New Year began, I’ve been on a cleaning and organizing binge, likely because of Japanese-super-organizer Marie Kondo and her new Netflix series. My wife and I even organized our kitchen junk drawer, usually a no-mans-land of forgotten items.

And in that drawer I found I had an old Corner Bakery gift card. Corner Bakery was an early entrant in the fast casual category of restaurants — places that tried to be a cut above hamburger joints and positioned themselves as healthier with fresher ingredients than tradition fast food.

But as always with such claims, the devil is in the details. Or should I say the salt is the devil in the menu? The reason I never finished using my Corner Bakery gift card was because of the high salt content of most Corner Bakery offerings. So I’ve had this card for years with about $7 left on it to spend.

So I visited the Corner Bakery site today to see if by chance its menu has changed from the high-salt offerings I remembered. Sadly, it has not. It does have some very cool nutrition search functions, including one where you build a meal and another where you can rank all the menu items by salt content (or any nutrition content).

The chopped salad, which I used to order regularly there before my first stent in 2012, has 2,710 mgs of salt, for example, too much even for someone who doesn’t have heart disease.

The roast beef and cheddar sandwich, another old favorite of mine, has 1,870 mgs of salt, less than the salad, which I used to think of as healthier. All the salad dressings, including the balsamic vinaigrette which you might think is healthier, are loaded with salt too.

So I guess my Corner Bakery gift card will stay in the drawer for a few more years.