Tijuana's Caesar's Restaurant: Home of the Caesar Salad

NYT
October 22, 2008
Tijuana Journal
Wary Tourists Toss Aside a Chance to Taste History
By MARC LACEY

TIJUANA, Mexico — Eating salad in Mexico is discouraged by most guide books, citing the potential threat to the digestive tract.

It is true that the water can be problematic south of the border, if it is consumed directly from the tap or used to wash one’s salad fixings. At the same time, fine dining abounds throughout Mexico, white tablecloth affairs with celebrity chefs, mouthwatering menus and fancy water that comes from elegantly shaped bottles.

Although not in that lofty league, there is one eatery with a particularly distinguished history that is relevant to the question of whether one should consume salads in Mexico. Called Caesar’s Restaurant, it sits in the seediest of spots, along Tijuana’s Avenida Revolución, and specializes in salad — Caesar salad, to be exact, which it says was invented in its kitchen in 1924.

Jorge Chávez is the manager of Caesar’s and the keeper of the historical flame. After a waiter whipped up a salad tableside the other day in an elaborate ceremony, Mr. Chávez plunked down to defend his lettuce.

A table full of customers had recently left the premises after taking advantage of Caesar’s two-for-one beer special but not daring to eat the food. One of them had scoffed when a waiter offered her a salad. She made a crack about that being a sure-fire vacation spoiler.

“She has bad information,” Mr. Chávez said when the group was gone. “We’re not using dirty water on our salad. I’d put our salad up against anyone, anywhere.”

He then veered into a bit of history. One day back in 1924, Caesar Cardini, an Italian immigrant who ran a restaurant in what was then an upscale tourist zone in Tijuana, found himself low on provisions but with some hungry friends to feed. As the story goes, he threw what he had — some lettuce, garlic and pieces of bread, among other ingredients — into a bowl and came up with a creation that has lived on ever since.

There are some disagreements over the details of the story. Was it a cook who really came up with it? Did Caesar’s brother, Alex, first throw anchovies into the mix? But there appears to be some support that the Caesar salad was born in Tijuana, or at the very least earned its worldwide reputation here.

None other than Julia Child wrote in one of her cookbooks, “One of my early remembrances of restaurant life was going to Tijuana in 1925 or 1926 with my parents, who were wildly excited that they should finally lunch at Caesar’s Restaurant.”

She recalled Mr. Cardini himself rolling a big cart to her family’s table and throwing some raw eggs into the mix.

Raw egg yolks are still part of the recipe here. Also tossed into the large wooden bowl, which is big enough to bathe a newborn child, are olive oil, ground anchovies, garlic, a dash of mustard and Worcestershire sauce, Parmesan cheese, pepper and white wine mixed with vinegar.

Large romaine lettuce leaves are dunked in the mixture and then laid out on a plate.

Mr. Chávez took pains to point out that each leaf is carefully cut into a diamond shape and then purified with a chemical additive to kill any microbes. The resulting salad, he contends, is not only safe to eat and delicious to eat but, in his view, quintessentially Mexican.

“Some of the ingredients are foreign but the hands that make it are Mexican,” he said. Another key addition are Mexican limes, which are squeezed into the salad dressing to neutralize the strong flavors of the anchovies, garlic and egg yolks. “No flavor dominates,” he said.

The biggest problem these days is that not enough people are digging in. Tourism is in the doldrums in Tijuana, a result of a variety of factors, including too much crime, police harassment and the economic woes up north.

The restaurant has struggled through hard times before. It closed for more than five years in the 1990s, and after it reopened, it installed a topless dance club in the back, which operates in the evening and supplements the paltry restaurant income.

There were only six people eating salads on a recent afternoon. Four of them were local university students who were on a research trip and were eating on the house. The other two were reporting on and photographing the salads for this article.

“You hear so much that’s bad about Tijuana,” Mr. Chávez said. “I want people to know that we have something to be proud of.”

And how is the salad? Well, the guy taking pictures let out a long “mmmmm” as he sampled the sauce. The guy with the pen thought the croutons, which soak up the zesty dressing, were among the best he had sampled anywhere.

Both of them lingered at the table, their stomachs feeling fine.