There is no salad on the menu at Lucali, Mark Iacono’s candlelit restaurant in Brooklyn, only pizza and calzones. But sometimes, and only if he thought to make it in the afternoon, he serves one anyway, a salad he says is meant to recall the end of Sunday dinners with his extended family, when it was just him and his grandmother left at the table. It’s a salad he would eat on the same plate he used for the spaghetti, the meatballs, the ziti — whatever she cooked, something meaty and red. The tomatoes are salty and soft, but the lettuce is still crisp, and there are black olives and a little red onion and maybe some soft leaves of celery. And when it’s all gone, he can run sesame bread through the pink-red dressing pooled at the bottom of the plate, and it’s perfect, the best thing to eat.

Pizza restaurants often serve salads like these, though they rarely rise to such heights. House salads, they’re generally called — all pale iceberg and wan tomatoes, canned olives, chunks of onion, everything awash in a watery vinaigrette. You see a pile of that next to a steaming pizza, a sad, eat-your-vegetables side dish against all the cheese and pepperoni, and you know it’s just something to pick at and eventually wave away. So it can be disconcerting, at first, to eat a version that is actually luscious, to experience how supermarket ingredients can be transformed through technique and chemistry into something delicious and rare. I ate that very salad at Lucali, dumbfounded and chuckling. I wanted to eat it all the time.