Caesar's

Caesar's occupies the ground floor of the Hotel Caesar's on Avenida Revolucion, the spine of downtown Tijuana, and it is the room where the Caesar salad was invented. The accepted account credits Cesare Cardini, an Italian restaurateur who had moved his business south of the border during Prohibition, with improvising the dish for a busy Fourth of July service in 1924 from what remained in the kitchen: romaine hearts, garlic, Worcestershire, lime, coddled egg, oil and grated cheese. The restaurant fell into decline in the late twentieth century and was reopened in 2010 under the Plascencia family, the Tijuana restaurant dynasty behind Mision 19 and Finca Altozano, who restored the dark wood, red banquettes, mirrored bar and pressed-tin ceiling rather than modernising them. The salad is still assembled tableside from a wooden trolley, the leaves left whole and eaten by hand in the original manner, and it remains the reason most visitors come. Beyond it the menu is a Mexican-Italian carte of the kind Tijuana has cooked for a century: beef tenderloin, bone marrow, veal, handmade pasta, and a short list of Baja seafood. The wine list leans heavily on the Valle de Guadalupe an hour south, with bottles from Monte Xanic, Casa de Piedra and Vena Cava alongside Italian reds, and the long bar mixes classic cocktails for people who have walked in from Revolucion. Atmosphere is convivial and moderately loud, with a mixed crowd of Tijuana families, day-trippers from San Diego and food travellers; dress is smart-casual and no jacket is required. Prices are moderate by Baja standards, with the salad around 250 pesos and main courses generally between 350 and 600 pesos. Reservations are not essential midweek but are worth making by telephone for Friday and Saturday evenings, when the dining room fills after 8PM and the tableside trolley works its way slowly around the tables.