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Caesar Salad Biography

Source(google.com.pk)

MEXICO CITY – The Caesar restaurant in the Mexican city of Tijuana, which is considered to be the birthplace of the famous Caesar salad, closed its doors this week because of the recession, the manager of the establishment told Efe on Thursday.

“They kicked us out for not paying (the rent) ... last Monday,” said Jorge Chavez in a telephone interview, adding that a fire had also occurred at the restaurant three years ago.

“From that point to this we couldn’t get going again. Then, other economic problems came. The crisis hit us,” he said.

To the decline in tourism due to the recession, he said, was added the fear among many visitors about the lack of security in the streets of Tijuana in recent years, a situation resulting from the ongoing local activities of criminal bands, especially the Arellano Felix drug cartel.

This northwestern Mexican city for decades was one of the preferred destinations of many U.S. tourists who crossed the border at San Diego, California, to sample the nightlife in adjacent Tijuana.

In addition, the 64-year-old Chavez said, there has been a falloff in European visitors, who came to the restaurant “mainly on the lightest days, Mondays, Tuesdays or Wednesdays, since that group of tourists doesn’t like crowds much.”

The phenomenon of having to close is not unique to the Caesar restaurant but rather is a part of the general decline in business along Tijuana’s central Avenida Revolucion, where the eatery is located and where “practically the majority of shops have closed,” Chavez said.

The Caesar, founded in 1916, has gone through different phases since Italian immigrant Cesare Cardini – held to have created the famous salad in the mid-1920s – took charge of it.

The well-known dish came about by chance, on a day when Cardini had to improvise a meal for his friends with leftovers he had in the kitchen.

Romaine lettuce, garlic, anchovies, olive oil, wine vinegar, salt and pepper, Worcestershire sauce, freshly squeezed lemon juice, egg yolks, croutons and parmesan cheese are the ingredients that over the years were added to or subtracted from, shifted around and changed in the salad, often to suit the tastes of the individual customer, who could request a tailor-made version of the dish just the way he or she wanted it.

In past months, the restaurant’s staff, once as large as 40, shrank to five, who were all Chavez needed to serve the few customers who kept coming to Caesar’s, which had a seating capacity of 80.

Chavez had been at Caesar’s for 15 years, but he has 35 years of experience making the famous salad, the first 20 of them at a restaurant in Tecate.

“My aim is to keep working. I have to look for work,” he told Efe, still obviously sad over the news of Caesar’s closure. EFE

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