A delicious symbol of immigration, the Caesar salad has become a universal language, interpreted by chefs in countless ways.
I parked on the U.S. side of the San Ysidro Port of Entry, and after clearing passport control and walking down a barbed-wire-lined corridor, a turnstile to Tijuana clink-clink-clinked as people passed from one country to another. I got into the first cab I saw, its windows cracked open in the heat, and a driver took me through the city’s dusty streets straight to Caesar’s, the spiritual home of the Caesar salad — the original, born on Mexican soil in the restaurant of an Italian immigrant, and, as legend has it, on the Fourth of July.
Though the salad’s origins are famously contested, it’s most likely the invention of restaurateur Caesar Cardini, and last month, 30 Mexican chefs gathered at Caesar’s to celebrate the salad’s centennial.
Caesar salad is the greatest salad, the first salad I loved, with my mother’s homemade dressing and Pepperidge Farm croutons so crunchy that eating them drowned out dinner conversation. I have had a thousand Caesars since: packed into the plastic tubs of sad desk lunches, poolside and decked with precious white anchovies, and from the hands of chefs who have imprinted their own stories onto the dish. After a century, the Caesar salad, which asserted Cardini’s heritage in a foreign land, has become a universal language. You know a Warhol or a Kahlo when you see one and a Caesar when you taste it, in any form.
My visit to Tijuana was a pilgrimage to the monument, the global phenomenon of the Caesar salad, and I wasn’t alone. In the dining room of the cavernous restaurant, a father and his teenage daughter sat in anticipation. Tourists readied their iPhones as men in crisp white shirts and vests passed through the dining room rolling guéridons and performing an edible reenactment. Into a wooden bowl, these servers spooned anchovies (which scholars say weren’t in the very first versions of the dish), Dijon mustard, garlic, Worcestershire sauce, black pepper, lime juice and egg yolk, mixing the ingredients with salad tongs in hypnotic concentric circles. Unhurried, they drizzled in olive oil and scraped and scraped the bottom of the bowl until a cohesive dressing formed.
Last came parmesan and whole romaine leaves, which they gently coated in the dressing.
The first salad Eduardo “Lalo” García Guzmán remembers eating was a Caesar. It was at his first restaurant job in Atlanta, one he took after years working as a farm laborer in South Georgia. Later, in finer restaurants, García discovered his Caesar ideal, some version of which he serves at each of his stylish Mexico City restaurants: Máximo Bistrot, Lalo, and Havre 77. Early last year, I fought for the last bites of the Máximo Caesar, piled with melting slices of head cheese and fried garlic chips in lieu of croutons.
The Caesar, he concedes, does not taste Mexican. “But it represents this country so well,” says García, who was born in Guanajuato, raised in the United States, and deported to Mexico in 2001 and 2007. “I grew up in the States with everybody saying, ‘Mexico sends its ugly people, its workers, drugs, everything that’s bad.’ Then I discovered one of my favorite things to eat was Mexican,” he says.
The Cardini brothers — Caesar, Nereo, Alessandro “Alex” and Gaudenzio — hailed from Baveno, a town in Italy’s Piedmont, and not unlike García, they left home in search of better-paying work in the hospitality business. Caesar waited tables in hotels in Montreal and San Francisco. He opened a restaurant, Brown’s, in Sacramento. When Prohibition turned Tijuana into a boomtown, Caesar and Alex partnered in a series of restaurants and hotels just south of the border that catered to wealthy Americans who didn’t want the party to stop.
This is the context in which the Caesar salad was born, when garlic became glamorous and the mood defiantly buoyant. And just like the patrons who piled into Tijuana on weekends, it traveled back to the United States, to San Diego and Los Angeles, where restaurants widely reproduced the salad.
Like the most delicious of invasive species, it became ubiquitous on the menus of the country’s Italian restaurants. My mother’s recipe came from a mid-century continental spot in Palm Beach County. The last time García traveled to Dubai, he spotted Caesar salads in half the restaurants he dined in.
Despite growing up in Italian American families, neither Angie Rito nor Scott Tacinelli had Caesar salad on their dinner tables. “It was not something in my grandma’s repertoire,” says Rito, whose grandparents emigrated from Naples. But when the couple opened New York’s Don Angie, their ode to the American red-sauce joint, they knew they had to include a Caesar.
At the time, they lived on the Lower East Side, down the block from Yunnan Kitchen, a Chinese restaurant that served chrysanthemum salad. With those greens as inspiration, they built a salad on the porous borders of Chinatown and Little Italy.I’ve never eaten at their restaurant without ordering one.
“It’s the number-one selling dish at Don Angie,” Tacinelli says. “We use 250 pounds of chrysanthemum greens a week.”
To alter classic Caesar specs, Rito and Tacinelli double down on garlic (including fresh and roasted), crack a healthy dose of black pepper, and boost the umami with Italian colatura (an aged fish sauce), 24-month aged Parmigiano-Reggiano, and MSG-laced Kewpie mayonnaise. They dress the greens with lemon, olive oil and salt; pile them gently on the plate; and drizzle the thin Caesar dressing over top, along with a shower of Parmigiano-Reggiano.
“Each bite is more interesting than the next, with pockets of dressed and undressed leaves,” Rito says. Toasted sesame breadcrumbs, she adds, nod to the salad’s Chinese roots and the sesame-covered loaves Rito’s family enjoyed at each meal.When Masako Morishita emigrated from Japan in 2013, she was a dancer, and salads were the stuff of figure-watching drudgery.
“I don’t like salads,” said Morishita, chef of Perry’s in Washington, D.C. “But I had no choice, and Caesar was the salad I enjoyed the most.”
Now, the Caesar is Perry’s sleeper hit, the dish Morishita has kept on the menu the longest. It’s an ideal supporting player, she says, to such comfort dishes as chicken karaage and grilled anchovies — the setup to the meal, not the spike.
To her dressing, made extra thick, she adds Japanese togarashi, Kewpie mayonnaise and shio koji, the Japanese fermented flavor enhancer. The salad itself is composed of Little Gem lettuce and sturdy, bitter radicchio, which Morishita adorns with white anchovies and flecks of crunchy quinoa. “Everybody knows Caesar salad,” says Morishita, who won this year’s James Beard Award for emerging chef. “To make one no one had tasted before, that motivated me.”
“Cooking has no borders,” she adds.Really, almost anything can be Caesar-ed with the correct ratio of anchovy, garlic, parmesan and lemon juice: a roasted head of broccoli, shaved carrots or smashed cucumbers. García has marinated rib-eye in Caesar dressing. What is a chicken Caesar wrap, currently a TikTok phenomenon, if not a burrito that has been Caesar-ed?
“If anything, the Caesar is American in the way of reinvention,” says Philip Korshak, who owned the now-closed Korshak Bagels in Philadelphia.An itinerant restaurant worker a la Cardini, Korshak cooked and ran honky-tonks and bars in Houston, D.C., New York City and Austin before pursuing bagel and bread baking. When I ate the first bite of Korshak’s Caesar iteration, I laughed out loud. Inspired by a kale Caesar at Austin’s Home Slice pizzeria, Korshak had augmented whipped cream cheese with Caesar dressing, schmeared it onto both sides of a salt bagel, and stuffed a fistful of torn and massaged kale leaves into the center. It was a Caesar salad inside of a crouton, a perfectly dressed and joyful joke.“I will never, ever do stunt food. I don’t approve of it, but I do approve of looking at expectations” and questioning why, Korshak says. “I find that people who observe tradition for the sake of tradition are blasphemous. The question for me, always, is what does the tradition serve? How is it still resonant? If you can’t answer those questions, you’re just dragging around ghosts.”
Back at Caesar’s in Tijuana, the salad I ate felt less like an inviolable museum piece and more like a wax casting at Madame Tussauds. The parmesan looked suspiciously like the kind from a jar, not from an aged wheel. The minced garlic, too, resembled the commercially processed variety. After 100 years, and some neglect, the Caesar has more and better caretakers, cooks who put themselves — and no ghosts — in their salads.Soon after Prohibition ended, tourism in Tijuana cratered.
Cardini quit all his Mexican enterprises and opened a short-lived restaurant in San Diego; because he wasn’t an American citizen, his wife, Camille, held all the licenses. His namesake dressing was trademarked by his daughter in 1954 and sold to the conglomerate T. Marzetti nearly three decades ago. Now Cardini’s Caesar dressing includes xanthan gum, corn syrup and tamarind.For García, Caesar dressing is sacrosanct. He insists on blending it to eliminate the scent of raw egg. He uses only fresh garlic, 40-month aged Parmigiano-Reggiano di Vacche Rosse, Spanish anchovies, extra-virgin olive oil, housemade Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco, always a dash of that Louisiana hot sauce.
“I had to tell most of my cooks that it was a Mexican recipe. Until I told them the story, they didn’t understand why I took such care with the dressing,” he says. “No one in the restaurant makes this recipe except for me.”García’s favorite part of eating a Caesar, he says, is crunching into the center vein of the romaine. At home, he does not dress whole leaves but rather dips the lettuce into dressing, adds a lineup of accoutrements (extra anchovy, parmesan, garlic chips and capers), folds up the romaine — and eats it like a taco.
