As The Gladly turns 10, celebrate with this iconic Phoenix dish

When he opened The Gladly 10 years ago, Bernie Kantak was focused on one thing: making people happy.

“I think it’s important for everybody in the restaurant to be happy,” Kantak says, noting that means customers and staff. “I think it’s almost more important now.”

Kantak opened doors to The Gladly at the end of August 2013 with partner Andrew Fritz. As the Biltmore-area restaurant reaches a decade of service, it continues to be a fixture of the Valley's dining scene. Kantak credits much of the restaurant's success over the years to his team.

In the past year, Kantak has stepped away from the kitchen. Until then, he was a fixture at The Gladly, which has seen notable chefs such as Valentine’s Donald Hawk come through.

“I’ve spent most of my time at Gladly over the past 10 years,” Kantak says. “Now I’m trying to help my team evolve and help myself evolve.”

Currently, Garrison Whiting and Adam Harms helm the kitchen for lunch and dinner services, respectively. For Kantak, he's focusing on supporting his team through mentorship and encouraging them to stretch.

“Adam and Garrison are amazing,” he says. “I’m keeping (the menu) shorter so they can have more fun doing feature items.”

Creating the unofficial salad of Arizona

The Gladly made its mark by offering a balance of dishes ranging from casual options like the iconic Original Chopped Salad to the upscale, with a daily “chef’s whim” ribeye. The restaurant also features a rotation of daily lunch and dinner features and a deep well of more than 300 whiskeys at the bar.

Kantak loves how the rotating specials both dazzle regular diners and allow his chefs to express themselves.

“When we first opened, I was really letting my creative juices flow across the menu,” he says.

But there’s something to be said about a classic. Kantak came up with the Original Chopped Salad more than 20 years ago when he was at Old Town Scottsdale's Cowboy Ciao, a restaurant that shuttered in 2018. Then called the Stetson Chopped Salad, the dish is composed of artfully plated rows of smoked salmon, pearl couscous, arugula, pepitas, asiago cheese, currants, dried sweet corn and marinated tomatoes. Servers toss the salad tableside with an herb-laden buttermilk dressing.

Kantak brought the salad to his first restaurant, Citizen Public House, and then The Gladly. The salad became a hit with diners and has been imitated at restaurants locally and across the country – Kantak says he’ll still occasionally google the ingredients to see where it’s popping up on menus. The restaurant refers to the dish as Arizona's "unofficial state salad," it's been named one of Phoenix’s most iconic dishes and even has its own Facebook page.

“It has a little bit of everything. It’s packed with flavor. It’s super-packed with texture. It gives the servers a chance to interact with their guests as they’re mixing it for them. It’s really one of those super-craveable foods,” says Kantak, who estimates The Gladly and Citizen Public House serve 200 to 300 chopped salads each week. “It’s definitely not your simple salad.”

Celebrating 10 years

The iconic salad is playing a part in the restaurant's anniversary celebrations. To mark the occasion, the chopped salad will be available for $10 every Monday in August, and the deal is good for dine-in, takeout or delivery.

The Gladly will also host a special wine dinner called the Cork Dork Fight Club on Aug. 14. Fritz and Chris Lingua, the owner of the popular Phoenix wine bar and bottle shop Sauvage, will collaborate on a five-course pairing.

“We’re doing a kind of reverse pairing where we’re going from heaviest course first to lightest course at the end. It’s something [Fritz and Lingua] both talked about for years and years and years,” Kantak says. He and Lingua go back to when they both worked at Cowboy Ciao.

And, the restaurant’s patio is also getting an upgrade, just in time for the return of outdoor dining season. The current patio space will get a permanent covering that will shade the 1,200-square-foot space, along with cooling misters and fans. Kantak estimates the patio will be ready by Labor Day.

As he considers the future, Kantak says more restaurants from his and Fritz’s hospitality group In Good Spirits may be on the horizon, and teases that they won’t be concepts that Valley diners have seen from their team in the past.

“We’ve tossed around the idea of doing some new concepts,” he says. “We have a little stockpile of them that are ready to roll and waiting on the right space.”

But for now, the focus is on celebrating a decade of service at The Gladly, and Kantak invites customers to do the same.

The Gladly

2201 E. Camelback Road