Caesar salad, a simple salad made elegant, in its classic form, by tableside preparation.
In 1924, during the Prohibition era (1920–33), an Italian-born restaurateur named Cesare Cardini (1896–1956) moved his restaurant from San Diego, California, to Tijuana, Mexico, so that he could consume and serve alcohol without fear of legal retribution. His restaurant, known as Caesar’s, lay just across the U.S.-Mexican border and was popular with bibulous Americans as well as Mexicans, so much so that Cardini frequently ran out of food. As Cardini told it, on a busy holiday weekend in 1924, he found that he was out of some of the usual ingredients for his insalata mista. He assembled what he could from nearby shops and his cupboards: romaine lettuce, Parmesan cheese, lemons, bread cubes, olive oil, eggs, and Worcestershire sauce. He then instructed his chefs to mix and toss these ingredients at the table, an enjoyable bit of showmanship.
In 1935, after the end of Prohibition, Cardini moved to Los Angeles and worked as a liquor merchant while marketing his dressing for the salad, which he successfully trademarked. The ingredients were vegetable oil, lemon juice, egg, olive oil, wine vinegar, Parmesan cheese, salt, garlic, and a blend of spices and herbs that he did not reveal. The dressing found a willing audience, and by the 1940s the Caesar salad, so spelled, was a fixture at fine restaurants around the world.
Cardini opened a new restaurant in San Diego in 1936, while his Tijuana restaurant, which had relocated to a hotel a few blocks away from its original site, remained a destination among early “foodies” as well as Hollywood stars. Cardini—and, after his death, his daughter Rosa Cardini and her family—prospered. In 1986 she published her father’s original recipe for Caesar salad, which called for garlic-infused olive oil, coddled eggs, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, Parmesan cheese, and salt and pepper atop romaine lettuce leaves and croutons—in short, unchanged from his original scraped-together concoction.
The era of Cesare Cardini’s original restaurant ended in 2009. Tijuana was afflicted by epidemic gun violence with the rise of contending narcotics cartels, and for that reason, coupled with the Great Recession and an outbreak of avian influenza, the city saw few visitors from north of the border. The Cardini name lives on, however, in a brand of bottled Caesar salad dressing, while the salad Cesare Cardini created is a standard entry on restaurant menus worldwide.