Common additional ingredients include tomatoes, eggs, cheese, slivered almonds, walnuts and/or fresh or dried berries, such as cranberry or strawberry.

Spinach salad is classically served with a warm bacon or vinaigrette dressing, but variations are endless.

[9][10] The New York Times' Melissa Clark noted that the appearance of baby spinach in supermarkets, eliminating the need for time-consuming rinsing, de-stemming, and chopping of the mature leaves, increased her willingness to treat the dish as a weeknight dinner option.

[5] Saveur, Southern Living, The New York Times, and TheKitchn called the hot-bacon-dressed spinach salad a classic.

[18][7] The spinach salad with hot bacon dressing remained popular into the 1980s but by the early 2000s had fallen out of style; according to Wolfgang Puck writing in 2010, "You practically have to send out a search party to find one in fine restaurants these days."