Dining / The Dish: Watermelon Salad at Katie’s Pizza & Pasta

The Dish: Watermelon Salad at Katie’s Pizza & Pasta

A juicy watermelon topped with watercress, pine nuts, basil, and balsamic vinegar makes for the perfect summer salad.

Katie Lee Collier takes chances. She dares to put figs, pears, and squash blossoms on Neapolitan pizza (different pizzas, granted). Her toasted ravioli is stuffed with artichokes. And she’s so proud of her burrata, she serves it four different ways. In the summer, devotees revert to light house-made pastas, including a squid ink spaghetti with prawns, scallops, clams, and caviar. There are also fresh offerings such as this salad, an inch-thick disc of sweet local watermelon heaped with watercress, pine nuts, basil, and balsamic vinegar. Counterbalanced with cured olives and ricotta salata, it recalls the days when summer melon became sweeter when dosed with a shake or two of salt.