It’s not American. He is not from Italy. The most famous salad in the world, Caesar, was invented in Tijuana, Mexico exactly one hundred years ago.
This week, prominent chefs from around the world descend on Tijuana for a four-day festival celebrating 100 years of the Caesar salad, a global staple created in glamorous 1920s Prohibition-era Tijuana. A hundred guests participate in a re-creation of the Fourth of July party at which Caesar salad was first prepared for a group of visiting Americans. There will be a book launch celebrating the worldwide evolution of the salad, from Sweden to Spain to Japan, and events at local restaurants across the city.. Featured chefs including José Andrés, Dominique Crenn and Karima López.
For purists, it’s still possible to order the original Caesar salad—a romaine salad with a dressing of raw egg, olive oil, lime, garlic, parmesan, and other seasonings—prepared tableside by a formally dressed waiter at Caesar’s, a Tijuana establishment founded by Caesar Cardini, an Italian immigrant to the North of America, who is widely credited with creating the Caesar salad.
Today, Caesar’s, which has been revitalized by Mexican chef and restaurateur Javier Plascencia, reportedly serves more than 2,500 salads a month from a dining room whose dark wood and vintage photographs prove a proud connection to its past.
In Tijuana, a city that often makes headlines for its role as a tipping point for political crises surrounding asylum and migration, the Caesar Salad anniversary is an opportunity to highlight another story that highlights Tijuana’s passion for cultural preservation, said Claudio Poblete, a Mexican food critic and writer, and author of Caesar: La Ensalada Más Famosa del Mundo, a bilingual coffee table book that comes out as part of this week’s celebration.
“This is the first time in 100 years of this Caesar salad that the world will know that it comes from Mexico,” Poblete said. Tijuana deserves to be known for some “good news,” he said, about “the recipe, the cuisine, the tradition.”
Caesar sees it as just one example of Baja California’s vibrant cross-border culture and how it thrived long before the militarized border wall was built between the United States and Mexico. The salad is a masterpiece of multicultural invention with the rich flavor of Italian parmesan cheese, Mexican “green lemons” and Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce, which Mexicans call simply “salsa inglesa”.
Few recipes survive a century—and those can feel like dated curiosities (Hangtown fry, anyone?). But at the ripe old age of 100, the Caesar salad is probably enjoying something of a renaissance.
Defying its reputation as a bland stalwart of room service, this dish continues to be remembered and reinvented. On TikTok, Caesar salad with fries is the “perfect girl’s dinner” and the “equivalent of therapy.” In Los Angeles, less than 150 miles north of the salad’s birthplace, Caesar is booming as a popular fusion dish in restaurants across the city. Local food journalists tout the critically acclaimed Vietnamese Caesar in Santa Monica, which uses fish sauce instead of Worcestershire sauce, the Korean Caesar and several variations of the Japanese Caesar.
One of the liveliest new arrivals in Los Angeles this year is the Thai Caesar, tossed with lime and Thai basil, topped with bits of fried rice paper that stick out of the bowl like wings.
Not everyone is happy with Caesar’s spicy volatility. “We live in an age of rampant Caesar salad fraud,” complained an Atlantic writer this year, criticizing “supposed Caesars” that “lack anchovies, croutons, or even lettuce.”
How the Caesar salad was born
In the 1920s, when the serving and sale of alcohol was prohibited in the United States, Tijuana became a stylish destination for Americans who could not drink or gamble on the other side of the border. Hollywood types would come to Tijuana from Los Angeles.
On July 4, 1924, a group of Americans were at the Alhambra, a restaurant established by Cardini, for a Fourth of July celebration. On a hot day, for a large crowd, so the story goes, Cardini put together the ingredients left in the kitchen and prepared a special salad for the festive party. Cardini made the dressing at the table in front of his guests not only for the drama of the preparation, but to demonstrate the freshness and safety of the ingredients during a period of heightened concern about foodborne illness, Poblete said.
Large leaves of romaine lettuce were coated in a rich dressing and served with large toasted slices of crostini rather than small croutons. Poblete said the food was originally designed to be scooped up and eaten, not served sliced in a bowl.
Tijun’s Caesar salad further inspired According to Poblete, “Mexico’s first gastronomic pilgrimage” long before mole, mezcal and tequila-centric culinary tourism became commonplace. Julia Child visited Tijuana to witness the preparation of salad in her birthplace. So is Diana Kennedy, a British food writer who has written nearly a dozen books exploring and popularizing Mexican cuisine.
In a 1975 book, Child recalled going to Caesar’s as a teenager and watching Cardini himself “roll a big cart up to the table” and “throw the Roman into a big wooden bowl,” the San Diego Union-Tribune noted. “I see him break two of the Roman’s eggs and roll them, the green ones were creamy as the eggs ran down them.”
The kid called it the “salad sensation.”
One of today’s key Caesar ingredients was the later addition of another Cardini sibling, Poblete said: “His brother Alex put the anchovies in the recipe.”
As with most great achievements, there is controversy over who should really get the credit. While Caesar’s daughter Rosa Cardini promoted his version of the story for decades, and the family continued to bottle and sell his famous dressing in the United States, there are competing versions of the story in which Cardini’s brother Alex was the actual inventor, or another chef at Caesar’s who took inspiration according to his Italian mother’s recipe.
Many Italians believe Caesar is a creation of their country, Poblete said, and it’s not the first time Italians have adopted a product of Mexico as their own. A lot of Italian chefs would also swear that tomatoes come from Italy, and they don’t: “They don’t know that all tomatoes are from Mesoamerica.”
Based on years of research by one of his associates, a local historian, Poblete’s book supports Caesar Cardini’s claim as the true inventor of the salad. But since the rivals are mainly other members of the same restaurant, even variations of the story offer a level of historical accuracy that few other famous dishes have. “Caesar salad is kind of a miracle,” Poblete said.
Poblete said one of the earliest popularizers of the dish was American hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, who introduced Caesar as a room service staple in the 1940s when his hotel chain became an international brand, leading to the continued availability of Caesar salad. midnight order in hotels as far away as Bangkok and Rome.
Salty and shelf-stable, bottled Caesar spread further during World War II and became “the most famous dressing during military campaigns in Europe,” Poblete said.
In his research into the Caesar salad, Poblete traveled the world, tasting surprisingly fresh Caesars in Japanese stores, lunchtime Caesars with shrimp and chicken in Spain, and even the confusing inclusion of Caesars in the traditional Swedish “fika.” or an afternoon coffee break.
Rediscovering a classic
The key to Caesar’s longevity and popularity is the rich umami flavor of its dressing, said Clementine Song, one of the Los Angeles chefs who made local headlines for her popular Caesar remix.
“Even a bad Caesar salad is a great Caesar salad because it’s so tasty,” said Song, who says she’s had airport Caesar salads with “gummy chunks of Parmesan” that were still delicious.
Song is the chef de cuisine at Tsubaki, a Los Angeles-style Japanese izakaya that offers many different playful fusion dishes, such as salmon and daikon creme fraiche served on a Jewish deli-style potato latke. She originally created Tsubaki’s Japanese Caesar as a way to get rid of a 20lb wheel of parmesan cheese. She kept the classic parmesan and garlic salad, but substituted fish sauce for anchovies, ponzu, soy and yuzu for lemon juice, some sweet white miso for extra creaminess, and sesame oil “to bring home the Japanese vibe.” Instead of croutons, Japanese panko breadcrumbs mixed with garlic and salt are used in the kitchen.
What was supposed to be a short experiment was such a success with customers that it became a permanent part of the menu. “Every ingredient that goes into it is very umami forward. People are just drawn to it,” Song said. “It’s exquisite in a way you can’t put your finger on.”
Another of the most notable new Caesars is the creation of Diego Argoti, the 33-year-old chef dubbed “LA’s King of Chaos,” who recently opened the fine Poltergeist restaurant in Echo Park’s retro arcade.
When I visited on a recent evening, I sat at a table overlooking a flashing array of arcade games themed around movies and shows like James Bond, Stranger Things, and Jurassic Park. To my right was a young couple who had also come to Poltergeist with the sole intention of trying out Argoti’s acclaimed Thai Caesar.
While Argoti isn’t a fan of the dish himself (“I hate Caesar salad,” he told me in an earlier phone interview), he was excited by the challenge of turning a salad, usually a pretty forgettable menu item, into something special. . “Anyone can make a steak taste good. I want to be known for salad. That’s the biggest flex,” he told me.
Inspired by growing up in LA as a teenager and frequenting Thai restaurants with his mother, Argoti, whose family is from Ecuador, dreamed up a new take on Caesar with a dressing infused with lemongrass, lime leaves and fish sauce. capers and mustard.
Like Song, he faced a crunch problem: how to ensure textural contrast without using pre-made croutons or baking bread from scratch? He turned into pieces of leftover rice paper that he soaked in water, fried, and then dusted with a green powder made from parsley, so they resembled giant leaves with an organic texture.
The size of the rice paper croutons became something of a joke, Argoti said, prompting him to experiment: “How big can we make this salad?”
Readers, it was big. The bowl that arrived on my desk resembled a whimsical potted plant with three wrinkled, green-speckled leaves growing out of a pale pink bowl. I pulled back one of the sheets of rice paper to reveal a snowy mountain of parmesan mixed with frisee, crispy shallots and Thai basil, and an incredibly rich and tangy dressing.
I broke pieces of a sheet of rice paper over the rest of the salad, which was crispy and satisfyingly greasy, and ate it. Salt, cheese, crunch, lime. When I finished, the two remaining sheets of rice paper were still delicately pinned to the remains of the salad like the headless statue of the Winged Victory in the Louvre.
I realized that the real power of Caesar is that the nostalgia of its flavors can defeat any novelty. Poltergeist made the most dramatic Caesar of my life and it was still comfort food.