The History of Caesar Salad

There are several stories of how Caesar Salad came to be. Most of them revolve around a man named Caesar Cardini. Born in northern Italy, Cardini moved to America in the 1910s. He worked in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel and later opened a restaurant with a friend identified as Wm. Brown. A few years later, Cardini moved to San Diego to operate a French restaurant. Then in 1920, Prohibition went into effect. Southern Californian elites began traveling to Tijuana, Mexico to drink alcohol, so Cardini opened an additional restaurant there where he could serve alcohol to his patrons. This is where the story gets more complex. Caesar Cardini’s daughter, Rose, claimed that her father created the Caesar salad on July 4, 1924. According to her claim, the restaurant was overrun by Americans and short on supplies, so Cardini threw together the ingredients he had on hand — lettuce, olive oil, raw egg, croutons, parmesan cheese, and Worcestershire sauce — and prepared the resulting dish tableside, much to the delight of his customers. (Interestingly, the story notes that the dish was originally intended to be a finger food rather than a salad.) A rival claim states that Caesar’s brother, Alessandro “Alex” Cardini, created the dish while helping out at the restaurant. Alex had served as a pilot for Italy during World War I and wanted to impress a group of American airmen who had come into the restaurant. The story purports that he put together a finger food for them using ingredients he could find in the kitchen, which included many of the ingredients listed in Rose’s version of the story but with the notable addition of anchovies. Reportedly, Alex named his creation Aviator’s Salad, but when he left to open his own restaurant in Mexico City, the story states that Caesar renamed the creation. A third version of the story claims that a restaurant employee named Livio Santini assembled the famous salad using his own mother’s recipe from back home in Italy and that when it became popular, Caesar claimed the creation as his own. While we may never know the full truth, we do know that Caesar Salad was introduced at Caesar Cardini’s restaurant in Tijuana. In fact, it became so popular there that it was considered a tourist attraction! Julia Child herself even wrote about her family’s trip to the restaurant in the mid-1920s, during which they were served the famous dish tableside by Caesar himself. In fact, Caesar Salad soon became so well-known that it was copied by many other restaurants all across the U.S. and even became known in parts of Europe. In 1948, Caesar patented the recipe and in 1953, Paris’s International Society of Epicure named the Caesar Salad the “greatest recipe to originate in the Americas in the last half century.” Today, the Caesar Salad continues to be one of the most popular salads of all time.