Chopping it up in the Lab

When I came up with the idea of reviewing the restaurant at Selfridges, my editor surprised me by asking which one. Surely there was only one. It is a shop, after all, even if it does occupy over half a million square feet of trading space.

How many restaurants can it contain? The answer, incredibly, is 20. Admittedly, that's including things like Starbucks and the Häagen-Dazs Café, but still. Twenty! Harvey Nichols only has four. How can it possibly hope to compete?

In the end I plumped for Lab Café. This modest salad bar tucked away in a corner on the second floor has been offering a pit-stop service to Selfridges customers for three years.

It's not aimed at ladies who lunch - the Rooftop Garden Restaurant on the fourth floor offers a more leisurely dining experience - so much as women who are too busy shopping to devote more than 15 minutes to their stomachs. Its virtues are speed, efficiency and - above all - low-fat, healthy meals.

Its main stock-in-trade used to be preprepared salad plates, with dim sum for the less weight-conscious, but last month it started offering 'chopped salad', an American import that is long overdue on these shores.

The concept is a fairly simple one. You select five ingredients from a large assortment of lettuce leaves, sun-blushed tomatoes, green beans and so forth, which are then taken away, chopped up and returned to you with a dressing of your choice.

You then select another three things from a variety of more expensive ingredients, such as seared tuna, mozzarella and slices of roast beef, which are placed on top of your salad.

It may not sound like a culinary revolution, but the results are surprisingly good, not least because you get to design your own meal. For instance, I absolutely detest sliced cucumber - it has the texture of used tea bags and tastes of nothing - and I relished the opportunity to enjoy a salad without having to pick out half-a-dozen of these nasty little green discs.

In addition, if you choose one of the less healthy dressings, such as 'Caesar', it has a wonderfully binding effect on the chopped bits and pieces, mushing them all together to form a delicious dog's dinner.

Our fellow customers weren't quite as appetizing, I regret to say. To our right were a couple of plummy mummies - more Camilla Parker Bowles than Princess of Wales - while various overworked secretaries, trying to squeeze a shopping trip into that precious hour between 1pm and 2pm, wolfed down cups of soup in the corners. (I didn't try the soup, but it looked a poor second next to a plate of chopped salad.)