The "Thai Caesar Salad" from Poltergeist at Button Mash in Echo Park, Los Angeles.
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Topline:
The Caesar salad is ubiquitous in the U.S., from Italian American restaurants to fast food places. These days, the salad can also be found on the menus of some of L.A.’s most cutting-edge restaurants, from a group of chefs experimenting with the format and bringing new life to the classic dish.
The backstory: Caesar salad has been around for almost 100 years, invented in Tijuana as a dish to offer Americans. It had become a safe and mainstream choice, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that it came back into vogue on newer restaurants’ menus. More and more chefs are taking this classic salad as inspiration and infusing it with their own cultures and techniques.
What types of salads are we talking about here? The salads we see on L.A. restaurants’ menus use ingredients from a variety of cuisines, such as Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese, to emulate the umami bomb that is the Caesar-like fish sauce instead of anchovies or miso to get that creaminess of the dressing.
Caesar salad, with its luscious dressing, crunchy croutons and sprinkled parmesan, is one of the most popular salads in the United States, ubiquitous across Italian American restaurants, steakhouses, even fast food restaurants (McSalad Shakers from the 2000s, anyone?)
It’s no surprise, given it was created specifically in 1924 to appeal to American customers at an Italian restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico. Caesar Cardini whipped up the salad to offer to American merry-makers crossing the border to get away from Prohibition, specifically on July 4, it's said.
But while it’s eaten widely today, it’s only in recent years that the Caesar salad has returned to the menus of L.A.’s hottest restaurants, in many cases taking new forms. Drawn to its umami notes, chefs have reinvented the salad, often using Asian ingredients, while keeping the essence of what makes this salad so good.
“I think the reason why I love and everyone loves the Caesar salad is because it’s like an umami bomb,” says Klementine Song, the chef de cuisine at Tsubaki, “it just hits every taste bud.”
A Caesar salad traditionally calls for romaine lettuce and a dressing made with egg yolks (though these days, many substitute mayonnaise), anchovies, Dijon mustard, olive oil, lemon and parmesan cheese. It’s then topped with croutons or bread crumbs and sprinkled with parmesan.
“Caesar salad is probably personally the one type of salad that I order all the time,” Cassia’s chef-owner Bryant Ng admits. “I think for me, more often than not, it has to do with the dressing. I feel like everything else is just the vehicle for the dressing itself.”
“It’s the creaminess of it, so there’s a textural component to it,” he says. “And then there’s the umami funkiness that comes from the anchovies, and then you add that with parmesan cheese, which is a load of umami also. And you have acidity from the lemons. You add all that together, and to me, it’s just this perfectly balanced dressing.”
Here are some places breathing new life into the venerable dish:
Cassia
The "Vietnamese Caesar Salad" from Cassia in Santa Monica.
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For the Vietnamese Caesar Salad he created for Cassia’s menu, Ng opts for fish sauce instead of anchovies. “For all intents and purposes, it’s liquefied anchovies,” says Ng. The remaining dressing is fairly traditional with lemon juice, mayonnaise, parmesan and black pepper.
For the lettuces, Ng uses romaine lettuce but also throws in frisée because he likes the slight bitterness that it adds. For the croutons, he breaks a country loaf into bite-sized pieces and tosses it with a sauce made with pureed salted anchovies, olive oil and garlic.
He tosses white anchovies in the house chili oil and throws them in the salad. What’s particularly different in Ng’s salad is the presence of figs. The sweetness of the figs tempers the spiciness and the strong anchovy flavor and somehow brings everything together.
The "Japanese Caesar Salad" from Tsubaki in Echo Park.
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The Japanese Caesar salad at Tsubaki came to be because the restaurant had a surplus of Parmigiano Reggiano. Charles Namba, the executive chef and co-owner of Tsubaki, had asked the chef de cuisine, Klementine Song, to develop a salad that would use a lot of the parmesan. Song had an Italian cooking background, having worked at Alimento and Cosa Buona, so naturally, she wanted to do a Caesar to make it more Japanese while retaining the essence of the salad.
“In my head … it has to have garlic, it has to have parmesan,” Song says. She replaces the anchovies with fish sauce and the lemon juice with ponzu. To make it smooth and creamy, she added saikyo, a white miso. She then uses Kewpie mayo to help bind it together. For the salad, Tsubaki uses lettuce from The Garden Of …, a family-owned farm in Santa Ynez, topped with shredded bonito flakes and nori.
Her inventiveness has paid off. “It’s a huge hit,” Song says. “People love it so much, we can’t take it off [the menu] even if we wanted to.”
The new Caesar salad on the menu at Yangban in the Arts District of Los Angeles.
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For Katianna and John Hong, the concept of their restaurant, Yangban, is a take on their Korean-American identity. “Our cooking is pretty autobiographical,” Katianna says. She grew up in a white family in upstate New York, and while John grew up in a pretty traditional Korean household, he was living in a very Jewish suburb of Chicago, so they both had a lot of Caesar salads growing up.
“When we look back on our childhood food memories, there’s this very Americana influence. Whenever we see a Caesar on the menu, because it’s so familiar we always order it,” says Katianna.
The Caesar salad at Yangban marries the traditional salad with Korean cuisine. “Koreans cook with a lot of anchovies. When I first started being introduced to Korean food, I loved the tiny dried anchovies that are kind of glazed with a little bit of soy, garlic and sugar,” Katianna explains.
With the recent remodel and restaurant reopening, Yangban’s Caesar salad also got a facelift. It’s now presented as lettuce cups rather than a traditional salad. Little gem lettuce leaves are covered in a traditional Caesar dressing and then topped with radish kimchi, glazed Korean anchovies, gochujang and toasted bread crumbs. The salad has the essential components of a Caesar salad: the umami, the pungency of the anchovies, the creamy dressing, and the textural contrast from the toasted bread crumbs. But it has extra layers as well. The anchovies are sweet and salty, and there’s the heat coming from the radish kimchi and the gochujang drizzle. All the components sit on a leaf of lettuce, meant to be eaten with one bite, much like how the original Caesar salad was meant to be eaten with your fingers.
Location: 712 S. Santa Fe Ave., Los Angeles
Hours: Wednesday-Sunday 5:30 p.m.- 9:30 p.m. (Closed Monday and Tuesday)
Exterior of Yangban in the Arts District, Los Angeles.
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Poltergeist
The "Thai Caesar Salad" from Poltergeist at Button Mash in Echo Park.
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Ashley Balderrama
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Chef Diego Argoti knew he wanted to make a Caesar salad for Poltergeist’s menu before he even tried it out. Argoti’s concept with Poltergeist is to take something familiar and turn it on its head, and that’s what he did with his Thai Caesar salad.
“There’s an expectation of what [a Caesar salad] is, and then I just broke it down,” he says.
Argoti went through a couple of iterations with his salad. The final version has a sauce made with lemongrass oil blended with lime leaves. The oil is then emulsified and mixed with anchovies, more lime leaves, and mustard seeds pickled with rosewater. For the lettuce, Argoti uses friseé and drops in handfuls of fresh basil. Between the lemongrass, lime leaves and basil, it adds a complex and refreshing layer of flavors.
Instead of the usual bread-based crouton, Argoti makes a rice puff “crouton” sprinkled with a bit of parsley powder and blue fenugreek powder. The salad is assembled into three layers, each layer covered with cheese. Argoti didn’t set out to make a specifically “Thai” Caesar salad, but the name fits the flavor profiles he ended up leaning towards, and Thai food was the food that opened Argoti’s eyes to different cuisines.
“I’m not trying to use Thai as an adjective,” Argoti says as he talks about the idea of authenticity with his Caesar. “If you really think about it, it’s hard to be authentically a Caesar salad when it comes from Mexico,” he notes. “I don’t want to mention too much stuff about ethnicities. I just kind of mishmash so much stuff because it’s how I was raised in L.A.”
When Poltergeist opened, Argoti joked to his crew that he wanted to be known for his salads. Now, the Thai Caesar salad is the restaurant’s best seller.
The interior of Button Mash + Poltergeist in Echo Park.
