Sometimes you need a serious salad — a salad that’s hearty and fresh and satisfying enough to eat as a meal on its own. And If that craving happens to hit while you’re on Shelter Island, you’re going to want to pay a visit to The Lettuce Lady.
The Lettuce Lady isn’t hard to find. Head over to St. Mary’s Road, just a few minutes from the center of town. You can’t miss her banner, or her invitingly decorated self-service kiosk nestled at the bottom of a tree-lined driveway.
The Lettuce Lady, whose real name is Emily Needham, refers to the kiosk as a “shed.” Technically, she isn’t wrong, it is a shed. It just happens to be an impeccably turned-out shed that doubles as a roadside tourist attraction and an upscale convenience store.
If you came for a salad — as the lion’s share of Needham’s customers do — make a beeline for the fridge in the middle of the shed and help yourself to one of the perfectly packed 42-ounce containers.
“To-go salads are such a nice niche because a lot of people just don’t eat enough vegetables,” Needham says. “So they have this inherent guilt about that, and they say to themselves, ‘Okay, yes, I should have a salad.’”
Sure, people are always happy to have more vegetables in their life — especially the ready-to-eat variety. But Needham’s business has been successful primarily because the food she sells is fresh, reasonably priced and extremely tasty. Plus, a visit to the thoughtfully branded Lettuce Lady shed, including the completely self-service nature of the transaction, makes for a unique shopping experience.
On any given day at the shed, The Lettuce Lady might offer a Sweet Spinach Salad, packed to the gills with feta, walnuts, red onion, dried cranberries and a homemade sweet cherry vinaigrette. Or maybe there’ll be a Southwest Cobb in the fridge, with romaine, black beans, roasted corn, tomatoes, queso fresco, taco-seasoned croutons and homemade chipotle ranch dressing. The Vegan Citrus Caesar is another healthy option with vegan parmesan, pepitas, sunflower seeds, croutons and homemade vegan citrus Caesar dressing.
Needham estimates that she rotates approximately 150 salads in and out over the course of the year, and she makes everything she sells herself with fresh ingredients from Baldor Specialty Foods.
Most of the time, you’re likely to find the extremely popular Green Goddess, a robust concoction made with romaine, cucumbers, feta, almonds, pepitas, scallions, croutons and homemade green goddess dressing. And you never know when Needham will choose to whip up, say, the Fattoush Spinach Salad (spinach, cucumbers, radish, tomatoes, feta, pita croutons, lemon and homemade citrus-sumac dressing).
“I tend to fuss over what my food tastes and looks like, Needham says on her website. “So thinking up and assembling my salads is a bit of an art.”
The shed is also stocked with pasta and quinoa salads and a bunch of tempting dessert items, including several varieties of banana bread and various cookies, cream pies and tarts.
Once Labor Day comes and goes and the Island’s population thins out, Needham adds a selection of classic fall and winter soups to the mix, including French onion, corn chowder, turkey chili and split pea.
In addition to a selection of drinks (perfect for the bicyclists who cruise by in the summer) and bottled homemade dressings, there’s also plenty of nonedible action going on at the shed. The shelves are lined with an ever-expanding assortment of Shelter Island and Lettuce Lady-branded merch. There’s clothing (T-shirts, sweatshirts, tank tops, even onesies for the tots) as well as glassware, stationery items, makeup bags and more.
Not only does Needham personally prepare and cook virtually everything she sells at the shed, she also does all the merch-branding herself with her trusty Cricut machine. (If you’ve never explored the world of Cricut, take a minute and Google it; the company makes wondrous products for teachers and artsy-crafty types of all persuasions.)
Needham owned her Cricut for a while before she eventually started using it.
“At first, I just stared at it and said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing; I’m gonna break this thing,’” she remembers. “Then I watched some videos. And when I finally made my first T-shirt, I said, ‘This is so freaking me’ – and 500 T-shirts later, here we are.”
In addition to the food and branded merch, Needham is also into ceramics. Only recently, she has begun selling some of her original creations at the shed, mostly charcuterie boards and serving dishes.
It certainly doesn’t hurt that Needham’s mother, Stephanie Frances, is a teacher and ceramics artist whose work is well-known on the Island. Mother and daughter live within shouting distance of each other in the family’s compound just up the road from The Lettuce Lady shed, which gives Needham access to her mother’s fully appointed ceramics studio pretty much any time the mood strikes her.
At this point, Needham isn’t sure where the ceramics-making piece of her life will take her — or her business.
“If people don’t buy these, I’ll make some fun stuff every once in a while, and I’ll call it a day,” she says, gesturing to her ceramic serving platters. “But if it takes off, I’m happy to be ‘The Pottery Lady,’ too.”
Needham’s roots among Shelter Island’s 3,000 or so full-time residents run deep. She was raised on the Island, but she’ll tell you that since her mother actually gave birth to her in Southampton Hospital on the mainland, she doesn’t think she qualifies as a true local “harelegger.”
“I’ve been here since I was two days old,” she says. “But you basically have to be born on the dining room table to be a harelegger.”
Neeham’s mother first came to the Island from Queens in the 1970s to work as a waitress for the summer. Her father’s family came over from Glen Cove at around the same time, when they bought Coecles Harbor Marina, which they still own and operate today. (Needham’s parents have been divorced for 35 years.)
Before she reinvented herself as The Lettuce Lady, Needham worked on and off at the Island’s iconic Ram’s Head Inn for many years. And other than an eight-year period when she lived in San Luis Obispo on California’s Central Coast (and where her two young daughters were born), she’s been a lifelong Shelter Islander, as has almost her entire extended family.
“I’ve always appreciated Shelter Island for the magical place that it is,” she says. “When you grow up in a small town like this, everyone feels like family. I’ve never felt that anywhere else that I’ve been. I’ve traveled a lot in my life and I’ve never felt so connected to everyone as I do to the people here.”
The fact that Needham’s shed is completely self-service and adheres exclusively to the honor system says a lot about Shelter Island, the people who live there and the visitors who flock to it during the Summer.
This isn’t a cooler full of oysters or a stack of precut firewood with a cash box sitting next to it. It’s a fully functioning business with hundreds of items that trusts its customers – locals and tourists alike – to do the right thing.
The Lettuce Lady, as a business, got its start during COVID. Needham had recently moved back to Shelter Island from San Luis Obispo. During lockdown, as a way to help the community, she began delivering food, mostly to nurses and other frontline workers.
She realized that she was onto something when she started getting requests for deliveries from people she didn’t know. Soon, she was hand-delivering salads and other goodies to a relatively small but expanding list of regulars, including a handful of local Shelter Island businesses. Eventually, she started accepting catering jobs as well.
Last year, Needham decided that a full-time job with benefits made sense at this stage of her life. She’s currently managing the nutrition program at the Shelter Island Senior Center. When Needham began working full-time outside of her home, she shut down her food delivery business. But she soon replaced it with The Lettuce Lady shed, which she opened in June of 2024.
Needham is currently working full-time, raising two young children and running a separate business – a side hustle that now includes merchandise and ceramic art in addition to its core food service business.
So, does she have any help?
“No – and I don’t want any help because I’m too much of a control freak,” she says. “My personality is to pour myself into something if I’m enjoying it… all of this is me.”
This article appears in the July Fourth 2025 issue of Behind The Hedges in Dan’s Papers. Click here to read the full digital edition.
