Though the Italians as a whole love vegetables, including leafy greens, and consume them much more readily than Americans, salads, especially mixed salads, are far more popular here. But, you might not expect that the second most commonly found item at Italian restaurants across the country is the Caesar Salad. Fully two-thirds of the restaurants surveyed offered some version of it
The Caesar Salad was famously invented in the 1920s in a restaurant just across the border in Tijuana, Mexico by a couple of Italian restaurateurs for their American patrons. The salad began to be found on menus in nicer restaurants on the west coast by the end of the 1950s. It gained popularity slowly, but steadily from the 1970s through the 1990s, becoming ubiquitous in the last decade.
One of the interesting things about the Caesar Salad is that the creators, or at least their descendents, do not consider the Caesar Salad an Italian-American much less an Italian dish.
As in the previous articles, this information is culled from over 300 current and recent Italian restaurants in thirty-five states in a wide variety of price ranges.
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