Abu Dhabi is not an easy place to get a salad. Not as Americans would recognize it. Which is a little odd, because not much will grow in the forbidding climate of the UAE, but lettuce is on the list. Lots of water, lots of heat. That, we have here, same as the Coachella Valley.

What you find at the big supermarkets in the UAE are the random greens of western Europe (French roquette!), and restos rarely offer salads. The restaurants in the big hotels will have salads … but you probably would not want to pay that much for one, nor eat whatever it is they bring you.

Thus, I have pretty much relegated the notion of a lettuce-driven salad … to something that does not happen here.

So imagine my surprise when we discovered, just a few steps from where we live, a restaurant with real, honest-to-goodness, lettuce-based salads.

The place is called Shakespeare and Co., and is part of a chain. The decor is over-precious: relentless “accidentally” erratic and fusty and overstuffed and vaguely 19th century. If you are of a certain age, think Bobby McGees Conglomeration from the 20th century (big in the U.S. in the 1980s, thereabouts), and you’re closing in on the studied “grandmother’s attic” feel of the place.

But, they can do salads. And after six months without one, some of us would be willing to sit in a prison cell if we were able to eat a Cobb salad while we were locked up.

I am one of those people. And I ordered the Cobb salad as we sat on a random rattan couch that was too low to effectively use the table for eating.

It was quite nice. The Cobb. No real bacon, of course; pork is not sold in open-air eateries. But a veal imitation. A nice, light dressing, a hard-boiled egg, chicken medallions, avocado, two sorts of beans and large edges of iceberg lettuce.

Yes.

They also do a nice pear and blue cheese salad, and a Caesar, and several others I have not tried.

So, three years in … I have found a salad. A good one. For about $12. At a restaurant open until 1 a.m. Within walking distance of where I live.

This is a major development in the life of an American expat.