Given customers’ growing enthusiasm for ethnic flavors, isn’t it time to rethink your salad repertoire?

“Salad sets the tone for the meal,” says Joyce Goldstein, cookbook author, consultant and former San Francisco restaurant chef. Yet in too many operations, the salad bar offers only the usual suspects with no sign of the chef’s creativity or imagination.

Goldstein, whose specialty is Mediterranean cooking, believes the countries surrounding the Mediterranean offer a wealth of ideas for salads. Drawing from the antipasti tradition of Italy, the tapas of Spain, the hors d’oeuvres of France, and the meze table of Greece, Turkey and the Middle East, a chef can elevate the salad bar and make it a drawing card.

Familiarize yourself with the signature flavors of each Mediterranean country so that your dishes have an authentic taste, urges Goldstein. Then lure guests to these less-familiar salads by pairing them with other popular salads or entrees. Many people will take a risk on a new item if they know there is something else on the plate they like.

Asked to create a Mediterranean salad bar for a luncheon at The Culinary Institute of America at Greystone, Goldstein had a hard time whittling her selections down to 20.

Roughly speaking, many Mediterranean salads fit into one of the following categories. You’ll find numerous recipes to inspire you in Goldstein’s Mediterranean Kitchen and Mediterranean: The Beautiful Cookbook.

Bean salads: Use chickpeas, fava beans, white beans or lentils. Make dips and spreads (Greece’s yellow split pea puree, topped with olive oil and dill) or whole-bean salads garnished with tomatoes, eggs, tuna or shrimp.

Grain and bread salads: Use rice, cracked wheat, bulgur or farro. Add roasted red peppers, artichokes, cucumbers, arugula, chickpeas. Jazz up tabbouleh with walnuts and pomegranate dressing. Reserve stale bread for tomato-bread salads. The Greeks make theirs with barley rusks; in the Middle East, cooks make fattoush with stale pita, tomato, parsley, mint, radishes and cucumbers.

Chopped salads: Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, Spain and Israel make refreshing salads from finely chopped vegetables. Consider the shepherd’s salad of Turkey, a mélange of tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, peppers and olives; or the Moroccan version with tomato, roasted peppers, chiles, preserved lemon and cumin; or the Spanish pipirrana, with chopped raw tomato, onion, bell pepper, cucumber, tuna and egg.

Fruit salads: Not those soggy concoctions made with out-of-season fruit, but the fresh, zesty, fruit-based salads found all over the Mediterranean, such as the orange, radish and cinnamon salad of Morocco; the citrus and shellfish salads of Italy; or the brilliant combination of melon and feta enjoyed in Turkey.

Cooked vegetable salads: Probably the largest category, this group includes the countless eggplant salads of the Mediterranean: eggplant with roasted peppers in Tunisia; with pine nuts and raisins in Sicily; with tahini in the Middle East. Composed salads abound, made with potatoes, fennel, green beans, beets, roasted peppers. Cooked cauliflower and broccoli are salad ingredients in the Italian south, paired with anchovy, capers and other strong flavors.