Good morning. America celebrated its birthday this week with fireworks. But the nation wasn’t the only thing deserving of cake, a sparkler, and an embarrassing song shouted out by the whole restaurant: This July Fourth was also the 100th birthday of the Caesar salad. Today, we’re honoring the classic dish for enduring a century as a menu staple rather than falling by the wayside like the once-popular calf’s foot jelly. We’ll dig into where Caesar comes from (it isn’t Rome), how it ended up all over TikTok, and why it can be so dang expensive, so you’ll have something new to tell the travel companions you’ve already spent the most of the long weekend with.

—Abby Rubenstein

The mysterious origins of the Caesar salad

There’s a moment in everyone’s life when they realize that the Caesar salad has nothing to do with Julius Caesar. For many of you, that day is today.

If you’re done feeling like you’ve been stabbed in the back and are ready to get to know the Caesar better, we’re serving up the origin story of the salad preferred by people who are too adventurous for a house salad but too afraid to say “Nicoise” to a waiter.

The most popular story is this one: Italian chef Caesar Cardini is credited with concocting the salad at his restaurant in Tijuana on July 4, 1924. He originally intended it to be a finger food. His daughter claimed he ran out of many ingredients and put together the salad with what he had left in the kitchen—lettuce, olive oil, raw egg, croutons, Parmesan cheese, and Worcestershire sauce.

But…it’s possible that being stabbed in the back might really be part of where the Caesar salad comes from:

• Another story goes like this: Caesar’s brother, Alessandro, invented the salad and Caesar slapped his name on it when Alessandro left to open his own restaurant.
• The most nefarious version of the story is that an employee at Caesar’s restaurant named Livio Santini made it from his mother’s recipe, and Caesar took the credit.

Since that fateful July…“There’s been a lot of liberties taken, for better or for worse.” That’s how chef Molly Baz described the modern-day incarnations of the Caesar salad to The Atlantic. There’s a chance you may feel betrayed by restaurants offering a “Caesar” that’s not a Caesar at all—some are selling Caesars that lack lettuce, croutons, and anchovies but have yogurt, zucchini, orange zest, pig ear, and Buffalo cauliflower fritters.—DL

Why are the TikTok ladies ordering Caesar salad and fries?

Along with blaring the new Charli XCX album and dressing for a tennis love triangle, TikTok wants you to believe everyone is eating a Caesar salad and fries this summer.

Why exactly are memes celebrating the pairing littering online platforms? They appear to be part of an increasingly gendered cultural (and very online) conversation, occupying the same space as “girl dinner” and a “feminine urge.” It’s the perfect meal for a generation of women who came of age during the calorie-tracking, “earning food” era. The dinner even sounds like an outdated Cosmo tip that Lauren Conrad would recommend so you don’t feel bloated in your skinny jeans at the club.

Ultimately, though, the meal is popular because it’s delicious and dependable.

• Garlicky, umami dressing on crisp romaine, a leaf that falls perfectly in the middle on the iceberg-to-arugula flavor scale. And it’s all complemented by a fried and salted treat.
• Both menu items can usually be found everywhere—from a fancy patio to a road trip diner—and are almost always of decent quality.

Why now? Everyone’s on a budget. The meal is relatively cheap compared with other entrees. And with sit-down restaurant prices jumping 3.5% in May, the Reuben sandwich may feel just slightly out of reach.—MM

How the mixed bowl took over lunch

Noontime at your office might look like the Minnesota State Hockey Tournament with how much lettuce everyone has. Amid soaring food inflation, professionals are increasingly embracing the midday salad or salad-adjacent meal.

Why? Bowl-based chains found the cost-(nutritional) benefit sweet spot as the price of other lunch options rose:

• In the past five years, the average cost of a fast-food meal has surged 47%, Bloomberg reported. Dining out in general will run you almost 30% more than it would’ve in 2019, according to Labor Department data from March.
• The typical price of once-bargain lunches, like a Big Mac with a soda and fries, can now be just three dollars less than (or sometimes the same as) healthier options from fast-casual chains like Sweetgreen, Cava, or Chipotle, according to Circana.
• Inflation has also hit fast-casual—a Chipotle chicken burrito bowl that cost $6.50 in 2019 now costs ~$11, and Sweetgreen meals can reach $18 or more—but many diners are okay with forking over a few extra dollars for a bowl of good-quality vegetables, grains, and protein.

Double-double: The number of fast-casual locations in the US increased 10% from January 2020 to February 2024, lapping fast food’s 4.4% growth, per Bloomberg. Some of that fast-casual growth comes from successful expansions into wealthy suburbs. Still, fast food looms large: There were 13,000+ McDonald’s restaurants in the US as of May, Eater reported, which is more than triple the number of Sweetgreen, Chipotle, and Cava locations combined.

The markets like salad too: Year to date, Sweetgreen is +149% (but still not profitable), Cava is +132%, and Chipotle is +40% (and fresh off a 50-to-1 stock split). Meanwhile, McDonald’s is −15%, Wendy’s is −16%, and Darden Restaurants, which owns franchises including Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse, is −11%.—ML

Why is salad so expensive?

While salad chains may owe some of their recent surge in popularity to rising prices elsewhere, it’s no secret that the Chop’t, Sweetgreen, and Just Salad aren’t where you go for lunch if you’re trying to save a buck. It’s easy to think that these places—often criticized for offering an $18 salad—are raking in cash by overcharging you. But the reality is that salad is expensive, no matter how you slice and dice it.

Take Sweetgreen, for example

Despite a flashy IPO, the Holy Grail of fast-casual stops loses millions of dollars every month. For every $15 Sweetgreen makes in revenue from hangry email writers and other desk-salad eaters, it incurs $17.50 in expenses, according to Sherwood Media.

The CEO attributes its high operating costs to two things: ingredients, which the chain sources from farms rather than large-scale food companies, and labor.

Why are salad ingredients so expensive? You can blame nature and the government.

• Salad tends to be pricier than fried food because the ingredients are more delicate than frozen meat.
• But there’s also the problem of the US federal government’s favorite legislation: the Farm Bill, which subsidizes corn, soy, wheat, dairy, sugar, and meat—but not the components of a good salad, such as leafy greens, fruits, and vegetables.

Zoom out: Given these market realities, Sweetgreen plans to get profitable by staffing up with robots.—CC

Caesar recipes to put on the home menu

As Caesar learned the hard way, you should be careful about who you trust—but you can always trust that the ingredients in your Caesar salad are fresh when you’ve prepared it yourself.

Here are some variations on the classic dish that you can make at home with only slightly more effort than it takes to snag a ready-made one at Trader Joe’s:

• Prepare your salad the original way they did at Hotel Caesar’s, but only if you’re not too lazy to bake your own jumbo croutons.
• Allow Gordon Ramsay to walk you through his method.
• If you want some heat, try adding Calabrian chiles with this recipe that uses breadcrumbs instead of croutons.
• Make it heartier by turning the salad into a pasta dish.
• Crunch on chickpeas instead of croutons in this version (which is 100% vegan).

Bottom line: A combination of romaine lettuce, croutons, Parmesan cheese, and a creamy-yet-briny dressing is just the basic template, so don’t be afraid to experiment.—SK

We asked y’all for your salad opinions

And a lot of you are down to cough up some serious green for a bowl of greens.

We also asked you to finish the sentence “A Caesar salad is best served…” and most of you think it belongs as a side dish (39%) or as a meal at a restaurant (38%), more so than a main dish you’d make in your own kitchen (14%). Almost no one (3%) wants to eat a Caesar salad at their desk in the office.

Finally, we asked you to share what unique but game-changing ingredient you recommend adding to salads. Here are our favorite responses.

For Caesar:

• “Buffalo sauce to a Caesar salad—changes everything. Avocado too.”—Pat from Massachusetts
• “For a Caesar salad, chicken marinated in honey mustard.”—Julie from St. Charles, MO
• “Throw a habanero in when making the dressing in a blender. San Francisco FD cookbook Caesar is undefeated.”—Bryan from San Francisco, CA

For everything else:

• “Always have to have banana peppers.”—Ashley from Alabama
• “Honeycomb.”—Jessie from Connecticut
• “Tiny cut-up pieces of pizza, croutonized.”—Kate from Dallas, TX
• “Potato skins instead of croutons...it adds crunch and becomes less like a salad.”—Preston from Dallas, TX
• “Nutritional yeast.”—Tory from Florida