It’s not American. It’s not from Italy. The most famous salad in the world, the caesar, was invented in Tijuana, Mexico, precisely a century ago.
This week, prominent chefs from across the world are converging on Tijuana for a four-day festival celebrating 100 years of the caesar salad, a global staple created in the glamorous Prohibition-era Tijuana of the 1920s. A hundred guests are participating in a re-creation of the Fourth of July party at which the caesar salad was first prepared for a group of visiting Americans. There will be a book launch for a volume celebrating the global reinventions of the salad, from Sweden to Spain to Japan, and happenings at local restaurants across the city. Celebrity chefs including José Andrés, Dominique Crenn and Karime López will make appearances.
For purists, it’s still possible to order the original caesar salad – romaine lettuce with a dressing made from raw egg, olive oil, lime, garlic, parmesan and other flavorings – prepared tableside by a formally dressed waiter at Caesar’s restaurant, the Tijuana establishment founded by Caesar Cardini, the Italian immigrant to North America widely credited with having created the caesar salad.
Today, Caesar’s, which has been revitalized by the 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 demonstrate its proud connection to its past.
In Tijuana, a city often in the headlines for its role as a border flashpoint in political crises over asylum-seeking and migration, the anniversary of the caesar salad is an opportunity to highlight a different narrative, one that highlights Tijuana’s passion for cultural conservation, said Claudio Poblete, a Mexican food critic and writer, and the author of Caesar: La Ensalada Más Famosa del Mundo, a bilingual coffee table book that is being released as part of this week’s celebrations.
“This is the first time in the 100 years of this caesar salad that the world is going to know it’s from Mexico,” Poblete said. Tijuana deserves to be known for some “good news”, he said, of “a recipe, a kitchen, a tradition”.
He sees the caesar as just one example of the vibrant cross-border culture of Baja California, and how it thrived in an era long before a militarized border wall was built between the United States and Mexico. The salad is a masterpiece of multicultural invention, with its rich flavors of Italian parmesan, Mexican “green lemons” and Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce, which Mexicans simply call “salsa inglesa”.
Not many recipes survive a century – and those that do can feel like dated curiosities (Hangtown fry, anyone?). But at the grand old age of 100, the caesar salad is arguably enjoying something of a renaissance.
Defying its reputation as a bland room-service stalwart, the dish continues to be memed and reinvented. On TikTok, a caesar salad with fries is the “perfect girl dinner” and an “equivalent to therapy”. In Los Angeles, less than 150 miles north of the salad’s birthplace, the caesar is enjoying a boom as a popular fusion dish at restaurants across the city. Local food journalists are touting a critically praised Vietnamese caesar in Santa Monica that uses fish sauce instead of Worcestershire sauce, a Korean caesar, and several variations of a Japanese caesar.
One of the buzziest new dishes in Los Angeles this year is a Thai caesar, heavy on the lime and Thai basil, topped with pieces of fried rice paper that rise out of the bowl like wings.
Not everyone is happy with the caesar’s savory mutability. “We are living through an age of unchecked caesar-salad fraud,” a writer at the Atlantic complained this year, lambasting the “putative caesars” that “are missing anchovies, or croutons, or even lettuce”.
How the caesar salad was born
In the 1920s, when serving and selling 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 down to Tijuana from Los Angeles.
On 4 July 1924, a group of Americans were at the Alhambra, a restaurant Cardini had founded, for a Fourth of July celebration. On a hot day, for a large crowd, as the story goes, Cardini pulled together the ingredients left in the kitchen to make a special salad for the festive party. Cardini made the dressing at the table, in front of his guests, not just 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 with the rich dressing and served with large toasted crostini slices, not little croutons. The dish was originally designed to be picked up and eaten as finger food, Poblete said, not served chopped up in a bowl.
Tijuana’s caesar salad went on to inspire Mexico’s “first gastronomic pilgrimage”, long before culinary tourism focused on mole, mezcal and tequila became common, according to Poblete. Julia Child visited Tijuana to witness the making of the salad in its birthplace. So did Diana Kennedy, the British-born food writer who wrote 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 as he “rolled the big cart up to the table” and “tossed the romaine in a big wooden bowl”, the San Diego Union-Tribune noted. “I can see him break two eggs over that romaine and roll them in, the greens going all creamy as the eggs flowed over them.”
Child called it “a sensation of a salad”.
One of today’s key caesar ingredients was a later addition by another Cardini sibling, Poblete said: “His brother Alex put the anchovies in the recipe.”
As with most great successes, there is some dispute over who should actually get the credit. While Caesar’s daughter Rosa Cardini championed his version of the story for decades, and the family went on to bottle and sell his celebrated dressing in the United States, there are competing versions of the story, in which the true inventor was Cardini’s brother Alex, or another chef at Caesar’s restaurant, who was inspired by a recipe from his Italian mother.
Many Italians believe that the caesar is their country’s creation, Poblete said, and it’s not the first time that Italians have taken on a product of Mexico as their own. Plenty of Italian chefs would also swear that the tomato is native to Italy, and it is not: “They don’t know that all tomatoes are from Mesoamerica,” Poblete said.
Based on years of investigation by one of his collaborators, a local historian, Poblete’s book endorses Caesar Cardini’s claim as the salad’s true inventor. But, with the rivals mainly being other members of the same restaurant, even the variations of the story offer a level of historical precision that few other famous dishes have. “The caesar salad is a kind of miracle,” Poblete said.
One of the early popularizers of the dish, Poblete said, was the American hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, who introduced the caesar as a room service staple in the 1940s as his hotel chain became an international brand – leading to the persistent availability of caesar salad as a midnight order in hotels as far-flung as Bangkok and Rome.
During the second world war, bottled caesar dressing, salty and durable, spread further and became “the best-known dressing during the military campaigns in Europe”, Poblete said.
In his research on the caesar salad, Poblete has traveled around the globe, sampling the surprisingly fresh caesars at Japanese convenience stores, lunchtime Caesars with shrimp and chicken in Spain, and even the perplexing inclusion of the caesar in the traditional Swedish fika, or afternoon coffee break.
Reinventing a classic
The key to the Caesar’s longevity and popularity is the rich umami flavor of its dressing, said Klementine Song, one of the Los Angeles chefs who has made local headlines with her popular remix of the caesar.
“Even a bad caesar salad is a great caesar salad, because it’s so flavorful,” said Song, who claims she’s had airport caesar salads, with “rubbery shreds of Parmesan cheese”, that were still delicious.
Song is the chef de cuisine at Tsubaki, a Los Angeles-style Japanese izakaya, which offers many different playful fusion dishes, like salmon and daikon creme fraiche served on a Jewish-deli-style potato latke. She originally created Tsubaki’s Japanese caesar as a way of getting rid of a 20lb wheel of parmesan. She kept the classic salad’s parmesan and garlic, but substituted fish sauce for anchovies, ponzu, soy and yuzu for the lemon juice, some sweet white miso for extra creaminess, and sesame oil “to bring home the Japanese vibe”. In place of croutons, the kitchen uses Japanese panko crumbs, tossed with garlic and salt.
What was supposed to be a brief experiment was such a hit with customers that it has become a permanent part of the menu. “Every ingredient that goes into it is very umami-forward. People are just drawn to that,” Song said. “It’s delicious in a way you can’t put your finger on.”
Another of the most high-profile new caesars was created by Diego Argoti, a 33-year-old chef dubbed “LA’s king of chaos cooking”, who recently opened a fine-dining restaurant called Poltergeist inside a retro arcade in Echo Park.
When I visited on a recent evening, I was seated at a table with a view of a flashing row of arcade games, themed after films 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 Argoti’s acclaimed Thai caesar.
While Argoti himself is not a fan of the dish (“I hate caesar salad,” he told me in an earlier phone interview), he had been excited by the challenge of turning a salad, usually a fairly forgettable menu item, into a standout. “Anyone can make a steak taste good. I want to be known for a salad. That’s the biggest flex,” he told me.
Inspired by teenage years growing up in LA and going to Thai restaurants with his mother, Argoti, whose family is from Ecuador, dreamed up a new spin on the caesar with a dressing infused with lemongrass, lime leaf and fish sauce, as well as capers and mustard.
Like Song, he faced the crunch problem: how to provide the texture contrast without using pre-made croutons or baking bread from scratch? He turned to pieces of leftover rice paper, which he soaked in water, fried and then dusted with a green powder made from parsley, so they resembled giant, organically textured leaves.
The size of the rice paper “croutons” became something of a joke, Argoti said, pushing him to test: “How big can we make this salad?”
Reader, it was big. The dish that arrived at my table resembled a whimsical potted plant, with three crinkled, green-flecked leaves growing out of a pale pink dish. I pulled back one of the rice paper leaves to reveal a snowy mountain of Parmesan, mixed with frisee, crispy shallots and Thai basil, and an incredibly rich and savory dressing.
I broke pieces of a rice paper leaf, which was crisp and satisfyingly oily, over the rest of the salad, and ate. Salt, cheese, crunch, lime. By the time I finished, the two remaining rice paper leaves were still poised delicately over the remnants of the salad, like the headless statue of Winged Victory in the Louvre.
The true power of the caesar, I realized, is that the nostalgia of its flavors can conquer any novelty. Poltergeist had produced the most dramatic caesar of my life, and it was still comfort food.