No sooner did we rule on whether...

No sooner did we rule on whether the Caesar salad was invented by Caesar Cardini or his brother Alex (we can’t remember what we decided) than we have a new controversy to toss around.

This one involves Lawry’s the Prime Rib, which declared in a recent press release that it was the first restaurant “in the United States to serve a tossed green salad before the entree.”

The 54-year-old La Cienega eatery also asserts that it was the first to: limit the menu to just one entree (prime rib), offer valet parking, and use servers who identify themselves.

The Santa Monica Outlook questioned the salad-first claim, quoting food histories that indicate that the idea dates back at least to the turn of the century.

Only in L.A., meanwhile, would like to puncture a couple of other claims. Stuart Zanville, a spokesman for Knott’s Berry Farm, tells us that when Ma Knott’s Kitchen opened there in 1934 (four years before Lawry’s was founded), chicken was the only entree.

And we can cite John Burke’s “Duet in Diamonds” to show that valets outside New York’s fashionable Delmonico’s fetched the carriages of such celebrities as actress Lillian Russell and gambler Diamond Jim Brady in the late 1800s. (The only difference back then was that valets couldn’t change the settings on a customer’s car radio.)

As for servers who reveal their names to the diners, we’ll leave credit for that concept to Lawry’s--if the restaurant really wants it.

Certainly, waiter name introductions are associated with Southern California. The custom was even parodied in Steve Martin’s film “L.A. Story,” where a gunman walks up to a couple at an ATM and announces:

“Hi! I’m Bob and I’ll be your robber today!”

You may have heard that the pathologist selected as L.A. County’s new coroner won’t get the job because he flunked his licensing test for the third time. We wondered what kind of questions are asked of a potential coroner. A source in the county gave us three examples:

1--Who starred in the “Quincy” TV series?

A. Tony Randall. B. Jack Klugman. C. Telly Savalas. D. Thomas Noguchi.

2--Who is John Doe?

A. The state insurance commissioner. B. Gary Cooper. C. Unidentified male corpse.

3--Where is a toe tag tied?

A. Ear. B. Toe. C. Varies from state to state.

Too often L.A. is described as a city with no history when, actually, there is substantial evidence here of ancient civilizations. One can point to the 38-foot-tall pharaoh on the Park Plaza Hotel near MacArthur Park (see photo), not to mention the Egyptian Theater, the L.A. Coliseum and the Great Western Forum. The latter, of course, dates back to the Great Western Roman Empire.

miscelLAny:

So you’d like to live on Easy Street? Well, if you’re having trouble finding it, Easy Street is located in Highland Park, just northwest of the Pasadena Freeway.