100 Years Later, the Caesar Salad Returns to Its Roots

In the spring of 2010, Juan José Plascencia, founder of Tijuana-based restaurant group Grupo Plascencia, and his son, Juan José Plascencia Jr., were strolling down the legendary strip Avenida Revolución when they learned that Caesar’s Restaurant was closing. The Tijuana institution that created Caesar’s salad — arguably the world’s most famous salad — seemed fated to fade away like the Prohibition-era Hollywood elite and bootlegging mobsters that once commanded the same streets. There was no public outcry, no final celebrations, and no line out the door for one last order of crisp romaine leaves coated in garlicky dressing. The furniture, including its iconic rolling salad carts, was out on the sidewalk; the restaurant’s owners had been evicted and locked out for failing to pay rent.

“My father and brother saw that all the equipment was out on the street, so they called Armando Avakian, the owner of the building, right away and he asked if we were interested in renting it,” says chef Javier Plascencia, Juan José Plascencia Sr.’s son and owner of Valle de Guadalupe’s Michelin-starred Animalón.

Springing into action, the Grupo Plascencia’s team held an emergency meeting to discuss taking over the historic restaurant, which originally opened in 1923. “My dad thought it was sad to see this institution go away,” Javier says. Avakian, relieved to hand over the keys to a family of respected restaurateurs, signed the deal. Within months, using old photos provided by Avakian as a reference, the restaurant’s much-neglected dark wood interior and black-and-white checkerboard tiled floors were restored to their roaring twenties glory. On July 24, 2010, Caesar’s reopened in its new iteration with Plascencia in place as executive chef.

Caesar’s Restaurant

Caesar’s Restaurant

The Caesar’s salad came to prominence before the worldwide fascination with Tijuana-style carne asada and birria de res, both created in the 1950s, and decades before the first lobster joint opened in Puerto Nuevo, which sealed Baja California as a destination for seafood-loving tourists. Long before Valle de Guadalupe grape farmers decided to produce wine instead of selling their crops to make cheap 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 apparent 100-year anniversary of the invention of Caesar’s salad, now featured widely on restaurant menus, its components sold in plastic supermarket bags across the United States. Tijuana can celebrate the salad’s local roots, but the recipe’s legacy is grounded in its malleability: the Caesar, as it’s more widely referred to today, can be topped with blackened chicken or a salmon filet, its dressing infused with black garlic or made vegan with avocado. The recipe parallels its border town origins, reflecting cross-cultural culinary ingenuity without demanding strict adherence to tradition.

There’s strong consensus that Caesar’s Restaurant popularized the salad recipe in Tijuana, but its creator and details of its emanation remain somewhat in dispute. According to one theory, the iconic Caesar’s salad was developed by Italian immigrant owner Caesar Cardini (born Césare Cardini) and his brother, the restaurant’s chef, Alex Cardini. However, a recent New York Times report suggests it may have originated through the mother of one of the restaurant’s cooks, Livio Santini.

Its purported anniversary date only adds to the mystique. According to legend, Caesar’s first served its famous salad on July 4, 1924 — a convenient intersection with Independence Day in the United States. Such a date might have appealed to Caesar’s American clientele, who, following the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1919 and the passage of the Volstead Act by Congress later that year, frequented the border towns of Mexico. During the summer season, businesses in Tijuana, including Caesar’s, seized the opportunity to sell alcohol, gambling, and Caesar’s salad.

Illustration by Lille Allen

But by 1933, just under a decade after the dawn of the Caesar, Tijuana’s appeal as a destination for American drinkers waned. The passage of the 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition in the United States and dealt a serious blow to the town’s economy. Once again, Hollywood could stay home for its libations — no need for clandestine trips across the border. As for Caesar’s salad, it was gaining traction in places 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 passed along the salad recipe to restaurants like House of Murphy, Chasen’s, and the Brown Derby. By that time, Cardini, himself, had moved north to Hollywood to run an Italian grocery store and prepare and package his version of the dressing.

Meanwhile, Tijuana had gradually become a family-friendly tourist destination for day trips to buy souvenirs, take photos with zonkeys on La Revu, and eat local Mexican food. In the 1980s, the street surrounding Caesar’s Restaurant became a magnet for Southern California college students (this author among them) heading south to get hammered on dollar beers, eat cheap bacon-wrapped hot dogs, and party ‘til the sun came up. The wild scene sent families hastily scurrying back across the border at dusk — and Tijuana locals, off to more civilized environs — away from the nightly bacchanalia. By the late 1980s, Caesar’s and its glowing invention had sunk into the shadows. Plascencia recalls seeing “shitty green cans” of Kraft Parmesan cheese when eating salads at Caesar’s with his grandfather, and a strip club blossomed in the back of the restaurant. Fallen from its pedestal, Caesar’s had also lost the resonance of its salad’s origin story.

“Back in the day, no one gave a shit … The salad was popularized by Americans, not by us,” says Javier, who only recently succeeded in gaining support from the local tourism board to promote the centennial. “[State and city] tourism boards didn’t really pay attention until now.”

Further lending to its enigmatic status, the original Caesar’s recipe did not include anchovies, an ingredient now considered indispensable to its composition. According to 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 became a base from which to continuously refine and reinvent and refine once more. A simple search for Caesar salad recipes on Google delivers hundreds — if not 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 makeup more an idea than the sum of specific ingredients.

So it may not be surprising to learn that even the Caesar’s salad at Caesar’s in Tijuana has undergone an evolution. After taking over the restaurant in 2010, Javier realized he needed a veteran of Tijuana’s salad wars to make a change to its long-held recipe. Efrain Montoya, a longtime waiter and employee trainer at Caesar’s restaurant, had prepared salads under the previous owners before leaving to work for Victor’s, a Caesar’s competitor that opened in 1955. Victor’s was known for the Victor’s salad — a more cost-effective version of the salad made with local cotija cheese and fewer ingredients. Victor’s closed, somewhat fortuitously, at the time Grupo Plascencia moved to reopen Caesar’s. Naturally, Plascencia went after Montoya and his institutional knowledge of the Caesar’s approach.

With help from Montoya, the restaurant group restored the Caesar’s salad recipe to its roots, sourcing extra crisp romaine lettuce and Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano from Southern California, while integrating more modern touches. The anchovies, not in Cardini’s original recipe but later the standard in the restaurant, come from U.S.-based Roland Foods. “We use a 50/50 blend of extra virgin olive oil from either Casa Magoni or L.A. Cetto [Valle de Guadalupe wineries], and regular olive oil to cut the bitterness,” says Javier, who has also substituted limes for the original lemons used by Cardini. “Limes are just a better product in Mexico, and more available for us,” he says. Grupo Plascencia was given lots of memorabilia from Avakian, including old menus and photos; former customers donated photos of relatives that now hang on the restaurant’s walls.

Caesar’s Restaurant

Caesar’s Restaurant entered the 21st Century with uncertainty. American tourists still shopped on Avenida Revolución but ventured elsewhere to dine. Then, La Querencia opened in 2001, placing the spotlight on Baja-Med cuisine. The thrill of eating carnitas at Carnitas Uruapan, or catching the aerial consomé show performed by flashy taqueros at Tacos Fitos, lured in burgeoning food tourists. Soon, food media zeroed in on Tijuana cuisine and the Prohibition-era salad became a footnote, along with Al Capone.

Plascencia, his restaurant group, and Montoya, have vigorously fought to spread awareness of their Caesar’s salad since reopening in 2010, during a precarious time in the history of Mexico’s famous border town. Mexico was four years into a violent drug war waged under President Felipe Calderón, combined with the 2008 WHTI passport requirement to cross the border by land, which brought border crossing to a standstill. (The 2009 swine flu pandemic further depreciated its tourism industry.) Tijuana tourism was at another crossroads as businesses shuttered their doors along the once-prosperous Avenida Revolución.

Caesar’s reopening in 2010 was a harbinger for the area’s eventual renaissance, paving the way for a fresh bloom of restaurants, breweries, and third-wave coffee shops. Now, on the eve of the salad’s centennial anniversary, local families and tourists alike regularly make the trek to Avenida Revolución for a tableside Caesar’s, even more special when Montoya is your waiter-cum-garde-manger. Plascencia, who says that he is actively looking for the right space and partner to open a new restaurant in San Diego, is proud of his family’s work to save the restaurant and preserve Tijuana’s most famous salad recipe. This vaunted bed of greens is served on innumerable menus around the world, from the room service selections at InterContinental Athénée Palace in Bucharest to a grab-and-go option at the Wolfgang Puck Express inside LAX’s Terminal 7. Modern iterations include a tableside homage at San Diego’s own Born and Raised, and a talked-about Thai interpretation with fish sauce, lemongrass, and rice paper croutons at Los Angeles’s Poltergeist.

In the end, Caesar’s salad remains an icon dressed in 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 the components to make a tableside Caesar’s salad.