The romaine empire

America cannot get enough of the Caesar salad. In the past two decades, the simple combination of romaine lettuce, creamy dressing and Parmesan cheese has:

• Become America's most popular main-dish salad, showing up virtually everywhere from fast-food chains to white-tablecloth restaurants to the takeout counter in the supermarket.

• Dramatically altered the lettuce industry as the demand for romaine has skyrocketed.

• Turned the chicken-topped Caesar into the chicken item most frequently found on restaurant menus — more often than wings or even that perennial kid favorite, chicken fingers.

And still we want more.

Three-fourths of all full-service restaurants now offer a Caesar salad, compared with 57 percent just a year ago, according to a survey of the country's top 500 restaurants by market research firm Technomic.

Dole Foods, which introduced the bagged Caesar salad kit 12 years ago, says sales of its classic Caesar kit continue to grow each year, despite competition from other companies and Dole's eight other bagged salad kits. "Americans just don't get tired of that flavor," says Eric Schwartz, president of Dole's fresh vegetable division.

Although the Caesar may seem like the all-American salad, it actually was invented in 1924 by an Italian immigrant in Mexico.

Caesar Cardini, owner of a popular Tijuana restaurant, concocted the salad one night for some late-partying Hollywood guests, most food historians agree. He used romaine, then considered an uncommon delicacy, and just six ingredients to make a creamy dressing: garlic, olive oil, lemon, egg, Worcestershire sauce and Parmesan cheese.

The salad was prepared tableside, and posh restaurants in Los Angeles soon began offering it as well.

"The ingredients today don't impress us, but back then they were much more expensive and difficult to find. The Caesar, when it was first introduced, was considered exotic," says Vogue magazine food critic and author Jeffrey Steingarten.

As ingredients such as olive oil and Parmesan cheese became more common, however, the Caesar made the jump from upper-class rarity to mass-culture staple.

Demand for the salad grew, and the effect began to be felt in the lettuce industry. Over the past 15 years, romaine has gone from a tiny portion of the nation's lettuce crop to one of the fastest-growing vegetables to be produced, consumed and exported, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service.

Romaine production has soared so dramatically that in 2002, for the first time, the USDA's agricultural census gave romaine its own category. According to the government's figures, California, the country's largest lettuce producer, grew romaine on 15,500 acres in 1992. By 2004, that had quadrupled to 64,000 acres.

The Caesar also has proved a boon to the poultry industry, thanks to the idea of topping the salad with strips of cooked chicken to turn it into an entree.

A 2003 survey of about 1,400 restaurants conducted for the National Chicken Council found that the chicken Caesar was on 66 percent of restaurant menus; chicken fingers showed up on 50 percent. "We were surprised. We thought wings or tenders would be higher. But I guess it's the universal chicken dish," says council spokesman Richard Lobb.

The popularity of the Caesar, particularly as an entree salad topped with chicken, beef or fish, is expected to keep on growing.

The National Restaurant Association's 2005 restaurant industry forecast showed entree-salad orders registering the largest increase of all menu items at both full-service and quick-service restaurants. Nearly 80 percent of quick-service places reported that customers are ordering entree salads, such as the Caesar, more often.

And it's popular not only in the United States. When Didier Armand, chef at the Paris La Defense hotel, was named Renaissance Hotels' chef of the year in 2005, he noted at a luncheon that no matter what he put on the hotel's lunch menu, "the chicken Caesar always outsells everything."