Would you drive six hours for a salad?

The Caesar salad was just the excuse. The journey across myth, memory, and a border was the real story.

We drove three hours to eat a salad. Then drove three hours home.

Admittedly, that’s a long way to go for lettuce.

But let me explain.

My 10-year-old son, Everest, is deep in a Caesar salad phase — the kind of singular obsession that overtakes children like weather systems, sudden and total. It's really the only salad he enjoys, despite my years of kale evangelism.

My home version of a Caesar is decent enough. Romaine torn by hand, homemade sourdough croutons that perfume the kitchen with the aroma of garlic, Trader Joe's vegan Caesar dressing, which tastes bright and lemony.

But one evening, while absently playing with the dressing bottle at dinner, Everest paused mid-shake and asked: "Where did Caesar salad even come from?"

More questions followed: Who invented it? Was it Italian? Why is it called Caesar? And one of the things I love most about parenting is indulging that sense of curiosity.

Enter: Food Mythology

Food origin stories usually follow a consistent template: Someone important shows up to a restaurant/hotel/home unannounced. The kitchen’s in chaos. The chef panics. Someone improvises, and voilà: Chicken Tikka Masala. Nachos. The Reuben. Or any number of other crisis-inspired dishes.

The Caesar salad’s origin story hits every beat.

This story takes place exactly 101 years ago. It’s July 4, 1924. Tijuana is packed with American tourists crossing the border in search of tequila, parties, and a bit of freedom. (This is Prohibition, after all.) Restaurateur Caesar Cardini, an Italian immigrant to Mexico, is juggling a kitchen that isn’t prepared for a crush of visitors.

According to his daughter Rosa, interviewed decades later, the restaurant was overwhelmed. Supplies were low. So Caesar did what all culinary folk heroes do — he improvised. In the middle of the dining room, he threw together what he had on hand: egg yolks, Parmesan, lime juice, Worcestershire, anchovies, providing dinner AND a show. He tossed it all with whole romaine leaves because the kitchen was out of utensils, so guests ate with their hands, using the leaves like lettuce cups.

And it worked! Caesar’s salad became a sensation. Hollywood stars came to Caesar’s Restaurant for the story and stayed for the flavor. Other restaurants copied the dish.

In Julia Child's Kitchen, the chef recalls visiting the restaurant as a child in 1925: "Caesar himself rolled the big cart up to the table ... I can see him break two eggs over that romaine and roll them in, the greens going all creamy as the eggs flowed over them."

Like most food origin stories, I believe the mythology persists because it serves a purpose beyond historical accuracy. It transforms a simple salad into a narrative about immigration, adaptation, and the alchemy of making something from nothing.

And honestly, I embrace that. Sometimes the story matters more than the facts.

How We Walked to Another Country for Lunch

So I decided we had to visit Mexico.

Crossing the pedestrian bridge into Tijuana at San Ysidro — the busiest land border in the Western Hemisphere — was anticlimactic. One minute we were in California, waved through by a border patrol agent who gestured down the street and yawned, “Take a right at the McDonald’s.” The next, we spun through a turnstile into a different country.

I understand it’s not like that for everyone. My family has talked a lot about borders — not just in the abstract, but in the present-tense reality of ICE raids happening in our community, threatening people we know and love. For us, crossing is simple: a quick check of passports, a wave through. But we know that ease is a fluke — the luck of where we were born and the documents we hold.

That tension hummed beneath our crossing. We didn’t take it lightly

Instead of a taxi, we walked twenty minutes to downtown Tijuana. Past dental clinics, wheezy cantinas advertising $1 shots, and souvenir shops hawking blankets, ceramic Labubus, and discounted Ozempic. Past taco stands and gleaming medical centers.

At the bridge over the Tijuana River, a boy just a few years older than Everest played “My Way” on a clarinet with startling elegance. Sinatra by woodwind, echoing into the street. Another perfect translation. Another reminder of how art crosses borders even when people can’t.

A Taste of the Original

Caesar’s Restaurant sits on Avenida Revolución in the tourist district. The street outside is currently torn apart from construction, but there’s still a red velvet rope strung confidently across the restaurant’s entrance, like it’s guarding a posh supper club.

Inside: crisp white tablecloths, dark wood that has absorbed decades of conversation, black-and-white checkerboard floors. It’s dim, the lighting moody. A glamorous woman sat at the bar, silver hair swept into a chignon. She commanded attention while sipping something from a hurricane glass, her presence filling the space like expensive perfume.

We were immediately seated and handed oversized menus bound in gold covers, their weight suggesting the gravity of our undertaking.

Misael, our server, wheeled over a salad cart with the seriousness of someone about to perform a sacred rite. “This is the original recipe,” he said. No wink. No irony. Just reverence.

He held a large wooden bowl at an angle as he added ingredients one by one. Anchovy, egg yolk, citrus, oil, the dressing built in stages. Then the romaine was tossed with movements that were part cooking, part dance, precision married to flair. Everest's eyes tracked every motion, locked on Misael, memorizing it all.

Finally the salad was plated, leaves glistening, each one a perfect delivery system for flavor that had traveled through time. Everest took one bite, his eyes closing as he slowly chewed.

"It's the best salad I've ever had," he declared.

What We Brought Home

That night, back at home, Everest recounted the whole thing with wide eyes: the walk across the border and back, the oversized gold menus, the clarinet kid playing “My Way” by the bridge.

It struck me then that we hadn’t just eaten a salad. We’d followed a tiny, sincere question into something vivid and human. Not a checklist item. Not another thing to cross of a bucket list. Just one of those unexpectedly luminous moments you get when you let curiosity chart the way.

We didn't go for the passport stamps or bragging rights. We went because my child had a question and wanted to understand something. And in tracing that line from lettuce to legend, we witnessed a stranger crack an egg with practiced grace, watched him transform simple ingredients into a memory we’ll keep.

That exchange feels worth crossing any border for.

I hope tomorrow Everest asks about the origins of pizza.

What are you hungry for? Where will your hunger take you?