Something Weird Is Happening With Caesar Salads

On a July weekend in Tijuana, in 1924, Caesar Cardini was in trouble. Prohibition was driving celebrities, rich people, and alcoholics across the border from San Diego, and Cardini’s highly popular Italian restaurant was swamped. Low on ingredients, or so the legend goes, he tossed together what he had on hand: romaine lettuce, Parmesan cheese, and croutons, dressed in a slurry of egg, oil, garlic, salt, Worcestershire sauce, and citrus juice. It was a perfect food.

On a November evening in Brooklyn, in 2023, I was in trouble (hungry). I ordered a kale Caesar at a place I like. Instead, I got: a tangle of kale, pickled red onion, and “sweet and spicy almonds,” dressed in a thinnish, vaguely savory liquid and topped with a glob of crème fraîche roughly the size and vibe of a golf ball. It was a pretty weird food.

We are living through an age of unchecked Caesar-salad fraud. Putative Caesars are dressed with yogurt or miso or tequila or lemongrass; they are served with zucchini, orange zest, pig ear, kimchi, poached duck egg, roasted fennel, fried chickpeas, buffalo-cauliflower fritters, tōgarashi-dusted rice crackers. They are missing anchovies, or croutons, or even lettuce. In October, the food magazine Delicious posted a list of “Caesar” recipes that included variations with bacon, maple syrup, and celery; asparagus, fava beans, smoked trout, and dill; and tandoori prawns, prosciutto, kale chips, and mung-bean sprouts. The so-called Caesar at Kitchen Mouse Cafe, in Los Angeles, includes “pickled carrot, radish & coriander seeds, garlicky croutons, crispy oyster mushrooms, lemon dressing.” Molly Baz is a chef, a cookbook author, and a bit of a Caesar obsessive—she owns a pair of sneakers with cae on one tongue and sal on the other—and she put it succinctly when she told me, “There’s been a lot of liberties taken, for better or for worse.”

It’s all a little peculiar, at least in the sense that words are supposed to mean something. Imagine ordering a “hamburger” that contained a bun and some lettuce, with chicken, marinara sauce, and basil Mad-Libbed between. Or cacio e pepe with, say, carrots and Christmas ham. To be clear, modifying the Caesar isn’t fundamentally a bad thing, as long as the flavors resemble those of the original. Baz likes her Caesar with anchovies (traditional! controversial! correct!) but said she’s happy to swap in fish sauce, capers, or “other salty, briny things.” Jacob Sessoms, a restaurant chef in Asheville, North Carolina, told me he doesn’t mind an alternative green but draws the line at, say, pomegranate seeds. Jason Kaplan, the CEO of a restaurant-consulting firm in New York, doesn’t mind a miso Caesar. “Because of the saltiness and the complexity, because it’s a fermented soybean paste, you know?” he told me. “That doesn’t piss me off as much as somebody saying that ‘this is a Caesar salad,’ when clearly there’s nothing to say it’s even closely related.”

The Caesar’s mission creep toward absurdity began long before the tequila and the fava beans. In fact, it has been going on for decades—first slowly, then quickly, swept along by and reflective of many of the biggest shifts in American dining. Michael Whiteman is a consultant whose firm helped open restaurants such as Windows on the World and the Rainbow Room, in New York. He remembers first seeing the Caesar start to meaningfully change about 40 years ago, when “hot things on cold things” became trendy among innovative California restaurants, and his friend James Beard returned from a trip out West raving about a Caesar topped with fried chicken livers. This was also, notably, the era of the power lunch, when restaurant chefs needed dishes that were hearty but still lunchtime-light, and quick to prepare. The chicken Caesar started appearing on menus, Whiteman told me, followed by the steak Caesar, and “it went downhill from there.”

In the 1980s and ’90s, as advances in agriculture, shipping, and food culture increased Americans’ access to a variety of produce, chefs started swapping out the traditional romaine for whatever the leafy green of the moment was: little gem, arugula, frisée. At that point, the Caesar was still found mostly in Italian American and New American restaurants. But as “fusion” took hold and culinary nationalism abated, the Caesar became a staple of Mexican American and Asian American chain restaurants, zhuzhed up with tortilla strips or wontons for a mainstream dining public who wanted something different yet familiar.

More recently, stunt food has come for the Caesar. “We’re living in a period of extreme eating, meaning extreme in terms of outlandish,” Whiteman told me, in which “innovation for its own sake” seems to be motivating chefs and restaurants up and down the price spectrum. Whiteman calls the resulting dishes “mutants.”

[Read: How American cuisine became a melting pot]

To some degree, the reason for all of this experimentation is obvious: Caesar salads—even bastardized ones—rock, and people want to buy them. “Isn’t it perhaps kind of the case that the Caesar salad might be close to the perfect dish?” Sessoms said. “It hits all of your dopamine receptors that are palate related, with umami, fat, and tons of salt.”

The Caesar is a crowd-pleaser salad, a name-brand salad, a safe-bet salad. It’s also a format that allows for a sort of low-stakes novelty. That helps explain the rise of the fake Caesar too. Though demand for restaurants has generally bounced back since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, labor and ingredient costs are much higher than they were four years ago. Just like Caesar Cardini before them, chefs are looking for relatively cheap, relatively fast dishes, and creative ones are looking for classics they can riff on without alienating customers. “Would untrained American eaters be more likely to order a Caesar salad than any other salad? Yes,” Sessoms said. Sometimes, when he’s trying to find a use for specialty greens—celtuce, radicchio—he’ll douse them in Caesar dressing to get diners to order them.

At the same time, Kaplan told me, it’s hard to overestimate how important the widespread adoption of the online menu has been over the past decade or so. Recognizable favorites sell. When diners can see what’s available before they make a reservation or leave the house, the menu is as much an advertisement as a utilitarian document. Appending the name “Caesar” to a salad is a shortcut to broad appeal.

Last week, I called up Stewart Gary, the culinary director of Nitehawk Cinema, the Brooklyn dine-in movie theater where I ordered that almond-and-pickled-onion salad. He told me essentially the same thing: In his line of work, people have limited time with the menu, and Caesar is a useful signifier. “Look,” he said. “If we called it a kale salad with anchovy dressing, no one would order it.”

[Read: In 1950, Americans had aspic. Now we have dalgona coffee.]

Ancient philosophers were bedeviled by the question of whether the ship of Theseus retained its fundamental essence after each of its component parts was replaced one by one over the course of centuries. I’ve been thinking about salads for a few weeks now and feel pretty sure that a true Caesar requires, at minimum, garlic, acid, umami, cold leaves, hard cheese, and a crunchy, croutonlike product. Beyond that, you can get away with one or maybe two wacky additions before you start straining the limits of credibility. It’s about principle, not pedantry.

Besides, the more you learn about Caesar salads, the more you come to realize that pedantry is useless. The original Caesar was reportedly made with lime juice instead of lemon. It was prepared tableside and intended to be eaten by hand, like a piece of toast, “arranged on each plate so that you could pick up a leaf by its short end and chew it down bit by bit, then pick up another,” as Julia Child and Jacques Pépin explained in their version of the recipe. It was meant to be dressed in stages, first with oil, then with acid, then with a coddled egg (to coat the lettuce leaves, so the cheese would stick to them), not with the emulsified, mayonnaise-adjacent dressing common today. Crucially, it didn’t have whole anchovies.

As soon as the recipe began showing up in cookbooks, in the early 1940s, it started changing: Some recipes called for rubbing the bowl with garlic, or adding blue cheese or pear vinegar or mustard. In her headnotes for one of the earliest printed versions of the Caesar recipe, published in West Coast Cook Book, in 1952, Helen Evans Brown described the Caesar as “the most talked-of salad of a decade, perhaps of the century.” She then went on to note that “the salad is at its best when kept simple, but as it is invariably made at table, and sometimes by show-offs, it occasionally contains far too many ingredients.” The Caesar is forever, which means it’s forever being manipulated. For better and for worse.