Quest Complete, a Crusader Can Say: Hail, Caesar

There are journeys, and then there are crusades.

Journeys do not necessarily have to have a Holy Grail. Travelers on journeys may have no real destination in mind, showing up at LAX with a credit card and playing a game of eenie-meenie-minie-moe with the airline terminals. Vegas is as good as Paris, just as long as they’re on the move.

Crusades are different. Crusades are planned backward rather than forward. You start out with the assertion that there’s something out in that wide, wide world that you’ve just got to, got to, got to have, and then you figure out how to get to it.

Crusades can also come on suddenly. Take last week: Deep in a vacation-deprived funk, I dreamed of traveling to other countries and strolling through bustling marketplaces and eating exotic foods prepared in the traditional manner. Then I remembered that I had no money and that the time off that I could afford to take could be measured in hours.

And then I remembered Caesar salad.

Of course! Caesar salad! One of the most distinctive plates of greenery in the world. Piquant, tasty, satisfying, complex, unique. And the prototypical Caesar was a mere 100 or so miles away in . . . another country!!

Yes! The Grail would be the restaurant at Caesar’s Hotel in Tijuana, long considered the rightful birthplace of the true Caesar salad. An unlikely but worthy destination for a routine-shattering one-day crusade. And, in a flash of true crusader inspiration, I realized that I could go cruising for salad almost entirely by rail: the Amtrak from Santa Ana to San Diego, and the red San Diego Trolley from there to the border crossing at San Ysidro.

I met my friend Harriet, who was also desperate for a day off and a decent salad, at the Santa Ana Amtrak station at 7:25 a.m., nine minutes before the train from Los Angeles pulled in. It was right on time, a good omen. (Another fine bit of portent: a round-trip ticket to San Diego from Santa Ana costs all of $24.)

Even under gray skies, the trip was lovely. Once the train pulls into San Juan Capistrano, all of the industrial back yards of the central county are left behind and a long stretch of track just above the ocean lies ahead. It’s almost all surfers, inland lagoons and broad ocean views all the way to San Diego.

And breakfast if you want it. I passed, saving it all for Caesar’s.

The San Diego station is a big, arching Early California structure, and the trolley stop is immediately opposite. We had to take about 30 steps to get from our train car to the trolley platform, where you buy your one-way ticket to San Ysidro and the Mexican border from a machine--for $1.75.

The trolley, a clean, efficient, fast bit of rolling stock that looked as if it had just been transplanted from Switzerland, arrived within five minutes, and after a few minutes of traversing downtown streets we were rolling along through more industrial back yards south of San Diego.

The final stop was across a thin street from the last McDonald’s in the United States and adjacent to a stone marker designating the actual U.S.-Mexico border. We had figured on taking a taxi from here to Caesar’s, but no more than 10 steps away from the trolley was a genial man selling round-trip shuttle bus tickets. The Mexicoach bus, he said, would drop us off in the heart of downtown in the middle of Avenida de la Revolucion--about two blocks from Caesar’s Hotel. The round trip fare: $2.

Revolucion is a riot of garish storefronts, restaurants, bars, curio shops and the fronton , or jai-alai palace. Caesar’s Hotel is in the middle of it all, white with a single spire jutting from the roof and huge red letters on the side identifying it. Almost exactly three hours from our departure time in Santa Ana, we strode up to the front doors of the hotel restaurant, decorated with a sign declaring it to be the home of the original Caesar salad.

And were met by windows masked with newspaper and a sign reading “Se Renta”-- for rent. I found a hotel employee and pointed toward the restaurant.

“Cerrado?” I asked. He nodded. Closed about six months ago, he said.

So this is how Dorothy felt when she found the man behind the curtain, I thought. No real brain, or heart, or courage, or trip home to Kansas, and no Caesar salad either.

But then the hotel guy said something that saved the entire day: We could still get the original Caesar salad a couple of doors down, and one floor up, at Caesar’s Palace restaurant, which was not part of the hotel but is owned by the same man who used to own the hotel restaurant.

We sat down to an early lunch, just after 11 a.m., in a big room dominated by a dance floor surmounted by a huge stained-glass dome. A good-sized buffet was set out and included a generous Caesar salad, certified to be the real McCoy. The service was attentive and the maitre d’ was deferential and friendly and spoke fine English.

The salad was worth the trip. Crisp, fresh, tossed with a creamy dressing that made the lips pucker only slightly, and with garlic croutons that complemented but didn’t overwhelm. And the view of the street and the town from the second floor was relaxing, even under the light rain that had begun to fall. The margaritas washed it all down beautifully.

In fact, it was all turning into such a fine crusade that we decided to have a few more margaritas in Tijuana Tilly’s and Nelson’s because, what the heck, we weren’t driving. And I remembered that, in Tijuana, Havana cigars were for sale. I bought one and smoked it with pure delight in Nelson’s.

That night, home and watching the 11 p.m. news, I felt like a low-wattage Marco Polo. The next morning, it all seemed distant and unreal. I actually wondered if I had really done all that in one day.

But there on the dresser was a card from Caesar’s Palace--with the salad recipe on the back.