Within the spring of 2010, Juan José Plascencia, founding father of Tijuana-based restaurant group Grupo Plascencia, and his son, Juan José Plascencia Jr., have been strolling down the legendary strip Avenida Revolución once they discovered that Caesar’s Restaurant was closing. The Tijuana establishment that created Caesar’s salad — arguably the world’s most well-known salad — appeared fated to fade away just like the Prohibition-era Hollywood elite and bootlegging mobsters that after commanded the identical streets. There was no public outcry, no closing celebrations, and no line out the door for one final order of crisp romaine leaves coated in garlicky dressing. The furnishings, together with its iconic rolling salad carts, was out on the sidewalk; the restaurant’s homeowners had been evicted and locked out for failing to pay hire.
“My father and brother noticed that every one the tools was out on the road, so that they known as Armando Avakian, the proprietor of the constructing, straight away and he requested if we have been occupied with renting it,” says chef Javier Plascencia, Juan José Plascencia Sr.’s son and proprietor of Valle de Guadalupe’s Michelin-starred Animalón.
Springing into motion, the Grupo Plascencia’s group held an emergency assembly to debate taking on the historic restaurant, which initially opened in 1923. “My dad thought it was unhappy to see this establishment go away,” Javier says. Avakian, relieved at hand over the keys to a household of revered restaurateurs, signed the deal. Inside months, utilizing previous pictures offered by Avakian as a reference, the restaurant’s much-neglected darkish wooden inside and black-and-white checkerboard tiled flooring have been restored to their roaring twenties glory. On July 24, 2010, Caesar’s reopened in its new iteration with Plascencia in place as government chef.
A portrait of Cesar Cardini on the wall.
Caesar’s Restaurant
Classic pictures cowl the partitions of the restaurant.
Caesar’s Restaurant
The Caesar’s salad got here to prominence earlier than the worldwide fascination with Tijuana-style carne asada and birria de res, each created within the Nineteen Fifties, and many years earlier than the primary lobster joint opened in Puerto Nuevo, which sealed Baja California as a vacation spot for seafood-loving vacationers. Lengthy earlier than Valle de Guadalupe grape farmers determined to provide wine as an alternative of promoting their crops to make low cost brandy, there was Caesar’s salad. It’s a dish as Tijuana — as Mexican — as a bowl of menudo con pata. July 2024 marks the obvious 100-year anniversary of the invention of Caesar’s salad, now featured extensively on restaurant menus, its elements offered in plastic grocery store luggage throughout america. Tijuana can have fun the salad’s native roots, however the recipe’s legacy is grounded in its malleability: the Caesar, because it’s extra extensively referred to at present, may be topped with blackened hen or a salmon filet, its dressing infused with black garlic or made vegan with avocado. The recipe parallels its border city origins, reflecting cross-cultural culinary ingenuity with out demanding strict adherence to custom.
There’s sturdy consensus that Caesar’s Restaurant popularized the salad recipe in Tijuana, however its creator and particulars of its emanation stay considerably in dispute. In line with one idea, the enduring Caesar’s salad was developed by Italian immigrant proprietor Caesar Cardini (born Césare Cardini) and his brother, the restaurant’s chef, Alex Cardini. Nevertheless, a latest New York Occasions report suggests it might have originated by the mom of one of many restaurant’s cooks, Livio Santini.
Its purported anniversary date solely provides to the mystique. In line with legend, Caesar’s first served its well-known salad on July 4, 1924 — a handy intersection with Independence Day in america. Such a date may need appealed to Caesar’s American clientele, who, following the ratification of the 18th Modification to the U.S. Structure in 1919 and the passage of the Volstead Act by Congress later that yr, frequented the border cities of Mexico. Through the summer season season, companies in Tijuana, together with Caesar’s, seized the chance to promote alcohol, playing, and Caesar’s salad.
Illustration by Lille Allen
However by 1933, just below a decade after the daybreak of the Caesar, Tijuana’s enchantment as a vacation spot for American drinkers waned. The passage of the twenty first Modification repealed Prohibition in america and dealt a severe blow to the city’s financial system. As soon as once more, Hollywood may keep residence for its libations — no want for clandestine journeys throughout the border. As for Caesar’s salad, it was gaining traction in locations far-flung from Tijuana. In a 1952 interview with Aline Mosby on the rise of the Caesar salad, Caesar Cardini was quoted as saying {that a} Paramount screenwriter named Manny Wolfe handed alongside the salad recipe to eating places like Home of Murphy, Chasen’s, and the Brown Derby. By that point, Cardini, himself, had moved north to Hollywood to run an Italian grocery retailer and put together and package deal his model of the dressing.
In the meantime, Tijuana had step by step grow to be a family-friendly vacationer vacation spot for day journeys to purchase souvenirs, take pictures with zonkeys on La Revu, and eat native Mexican meals. Within the Eighties, the road surrounding Caesar’s Restaurant turned a magnet for Southern California faculty college students (this creator amongst them) heading south to get hammered on greenback beers, eat low cost bacon-wrapped sizzling canines, and occasion ‘til the solar got here up. The wild scene despatched households swiftly scurrying again throughout the border at nightfall — and Tijuana locals, off to extra civilized environs — away from the nightly bacchanalia. By the late Eighties, Caesar’s and its glowing invention had sunk into the shadows. Plascencia recollects seeing “shitty inexperienced cans” of Kraft Parmesan cheese when consuming salads at Caesar’s together with his grandfather, and a strip membership blossomed at the back of the restaurant. Fallen from its pedestal, Caesar’s had additionally misplaced the resonance of its salad’s origin story.
“Again within the day, nobody gave a shit … The salad was popularized by People, not by us,” says Javier, who solely lately succeeded in gaining assist from the native tourism board to advertise the centennial. “[State and city] tourism boards didn’t actually listen till now.”
Additional lending to its enigmatic standing, the unique Caesar’s recipe didn’t embrace anchovies, an ingredient now thought of indispensable to its composition. In line with Mosby, the foundational recipe included “romaine lettuce, a one-minute egg, garlic croutons, Parmesan or Romano cheese, lemon juice, garlic, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, white pepper, pear vinegar, and olive oil.” Over time, the salad turned a base from which to repeatedly refine and reinvent and refine as soon as extra. A easy seek for Caesar salad recipes on Google delivers a whole lot — if not tens of millions — of variations, from a Pinoy-style Caesar with calamansi juice to a broccoli Caesar that forgoes romaine for sturdier brassicas. Globally, the iterations are boundless; its make-up extra an concept than the sum of particular elements.
So it will not be stunning to be taught that even the Caesar’s salad at Caesar’s in Tijuana has undergone an evolution. After taking on the restaurant in 2010, Javier realized he wanted a veteran of Tijuana’s salad wars to make a change to its long-held recipe. Efrain Montoya, a longtime waiter and worker coach at Caesar’s restaurant, had ready salads below the earlier homeowners earlier than leaving to work for Victor’s, a Caesar’s competitor that opened in 1955. Victor’s was identified for the Victor’s salad — a cheaper model of the salad made with native cotija cheese and fewer elements. Victor’s closed, considerably fortuitously, on the time Grupo Plascencia moved to reopen Caesar’s. Naturally, Plascencia went after Montoya and his institutional information of the Caesar’s strategy.
With assist from Montoya, the restaurant group restored the Caesar’s salad recipe to its roots, sourcing additional crisp romaine lettuce and Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano from Southern California, whereas integrating extra trendy touches. The anchovies, not in Cardini’s authentic recipe however later the usual within the restaurant, come from U.S.-based Roland Meals. “We use a 50/50 mix of additional virgin olive oil from both Casa Magoni or L.A. Cetto [Valle de Guadalupe wineries], and common olive oil to chop the bitterness,” says Javier, who has additionally substituted limes for the unique lemons utilized by Cardini. “Limes are only a higher product in Mexico, and extra obtainable for us,” he says. Grupo Plascencia was given plenty of memorabilia from Avakian, together with previous menus and pictures; former prospects donated pictures of kin that now cling on the restaurant’s partitions.
Longtime Caesar’s waiter Efrain Montoya.
Caesar’s Restaurant
Caesar’s Restaurant entered the twenty first Century with uncertainty. American vacationers nonetheless shopped on Avenida Revolución however ventured elsewhere to dine. Then, La Querencia opened in 2001, putting the highlight on Baja-Med delicacies. The joys of consuming carnitas at Carnitas Uruapan, or catching the aerial consomé present carried out by flashy taqueros at Tacos Fitos, lured in burgeoning meals vacationers. Quickly, meals media zeroed in on Tijuana delicacies and the Prohibition-era salad turned a footnote, together with Al Capone.
Plascencia, his restaurant group, and Montoya, have vigorously fought to unfold consciousness of their Caesar’s salad since reopening in 2010, throughout a precarious time within the historical past of Mexico’s well-known border city. Mexico was 4 years right into a violent drug struggle waged below President Felipe Calderón, mixed with the 2008 WHTI passport requirement to cross the border by land, which introduced border crossing to a standstill. (The 2009 swine flu pandemic additional depreciated its tourism trade.) Tijuana tourism was at one other crossroads as companies shuttered their doorways alongside the once-prosperous Avenida Revolución.
Caesar’s reopening in 2010 was a harbinger for the realm’s eventual renaissance, paving the best way for a recent bloom of eating places, breweries, and third-wave espresso retailers. Now, on the eve of the salad’s centennial anniversary, native households and vacationers alike repeatedly make the trek to Avenida Revolución for a tableside Caesar’s, much more particular when Montoya is your waiter-cum-garde-manger. Plascencia, who says that he’s actively searching for the proper area and accomplice to open a brand new restaurant in San Diego, is pleased with his household’s work to save lots of the restaurant and protect Tijuana’s most well-known salad recipe. This vaunted mattress of greens is served on innumerable menus around the globe, from the room service picks at InterContinental Athénée Palace in Bucharest to a grab-and-go possibility on the Wolfgang Puck Specific inside LAX’s Terminal 7. Trendy iterations embrace a tableside homage at San Diego’s personal Born and Raised, and a talked-about Thai interpretation with fish sauce, lemongrass, and rice paper croutons at Los Angeles’s Poltergeist.
In the long run, Caesar’s salad stays an icon wearing legend.
Caesar’s, Avenida Revolución 8190, Zona Centro, 22000 Tijuana, B.C., Mexico; +52 664 685 1927.
Caesar’s Restaurant
Caesar’s Restaurant
Caesar’s Restaurant
All of the elements to make a tableside Caesar’s salad.
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