There the offending dish is a foie gras and Kobe beef slider - a little hamburger that, for $15, comes with truffle aioli and red onion marmalade.
Ross' group has gathered at the 45-seat restaurant weekend after weekend to protest the burger's topping. But Chef Jason Ambrose, who co-owns the chic restaurant with his mother, isn't budging.
He did, however, seek intervention from local and federal authorities after, he says, the activists super-glued the restaurant's locks, shot out glass with a pellet gun and phoned as many as 50 times an hour. Ross insists that his group had no part in any of that, but Ambrose doesn't believe it.
"We're two people who took a building people were selling drugs out of [and] spent a million dollars to turn it into something positive. They want to come out and make us seem like horrible people, and that's not true," Ambrose said.
"I love foie gras. It's one of my favorite ingredients. It's buttery and luscious and it's been served for thousands of years. ... . It's my right to serve whatever I want to serve that's a legal product."
Ross, a vegan like the core members of his group, turned against foie gras after reading material published by Farm Sanctuary, a national organization formed in 1986 to fight animal abuse.
"I read about how it's produced and thought it was horrific," he said. "It's pretty extreme level of cruelty."
He's talking about pictures of ducks collapsed in filthy cages, their beaks hanging open and stuffed with feed. Images of birds with twisted, broken necks, ostensibly because of tubes inserted down their throats.
Salt, like many restaurants, buys foie gras from Hudson Valley Foie Gras, a farm in New York's Catskill Mountains, the largest producer in North America. Farm Sanctuary has targeted it.
Marcus Henley is Hudson Valley's operations director and a member of the Artisan Farmer's Alliance, a nonprofit charged with countering the protests. Calling objections to his farm "completely unfounded," Henley repeatedly points out that anyone can visit the farm anytime to see scores of healthy, happy ducks.
"If you could come here, you can go in any building, you can watch every part of the operation," he says. "The people who come here walk away and say, `Wow, that is not like anything depicted on the foie gras Web sites.'"
Protesters incorrectly imagine people in the birds' place and how torturous it must feel to be force fed, Henley says. The procedure simply doesn't hurt ducks, he contends.
