The Improvised Origin Of The Classic Cobb Salad

If you find yourself in the mood for a large, refreshing salad, you can usually rummage through the refrigerator and find enough vegetables to assemble something healthy for lunch. While there are no hard and fast rules to constructing any old salad, there are a few varieties that are distinct and exact in their list of ingredients. Think of a Caesar salad with its signature dressing, or a Waldorf salad with the addition of unique ingredients including celery, apples, walnuts, and grapes. Then there is the Cobb salad, a uniquely American creation with roots tied to Los Angeles, California.

The basic components of a Cobb salad are lettuce, tomatoes, hard-boiled egg, bacon bits, chicken, avocado, and blue cheese crumbles. Many recipes have riffed off of that recipe over the past 100 or so years, but a traditional Cobb is easy to spot. In fact, it is a pretty common salad that you are likely to find on many restaurant menus. Just like many other Hollywood stories, the Cobb salad rose to fame quickly, and it is all thanks to one fateful evening at the Hollywood Brown Derby. And, like many other food origin stories, the Cobb salad came about from a bit of an improvised moment from its namesake, Robert Cobb.

In order to understand how the Cobb salad was able to gain popularity so quickly, it is important to set the scene and learn a little bit about its original home, the Hollywood Brown Derby. At the height of its popularity, there were a few Brown Derby restaurants across Los Angeles, with the original and hallmark location found on Wilshire near the Ambassador Hotel. Foodie historians will likely recognize the Hollywood Brown Derby instantly for its unique facade: a giant brown derby the size of a building greeted its guests. Despite multiple locations opening over the years, none of the others replicated that iconic entrance. That first Hollywood Brown Derby opened its doors in 1926 and operated as a lounge and club space for the A-list celebrities of that era.

Other Hollywood Brown Derby locations opened in the following years, including one at the famed intersection of Hollywood and Vine. A third location opened in Beverly Hills near Wilshire and Rodeo Drive, and the fourth and final restaurant opened in Los Feliz. All four locations attracted Hollywood's biggest stars of the 1920s and beyond thanks to the success of that original location. So, if there was something on the menu that its star-studded diners deemed delicious, the world would likely soon hear about it.

The Hollywood Brown Derby restaurants were owned by the Cobb family — you can probably see where this story is going to go. The main owner, Robert Cobb, was no stranger to coming up with new and innovative dishes seemingly on the fly. Over the course of the restaurant's history, Cobb whipped up a grapefruit cake for Louella Parsons when she sought a dessert that would accommodate her diet at the time, per the Los Angeles Times. That spirit of improvisation would come in handy one evening in 1937, as Cobb himself was rifling throug the kitchen, looking for something to eat.

As the story goes, Cobb went through the refrigerator and acquired an assortment of ingredients, including lettuce, hard-boiled egg, tomatoes, and avocado. With some quick thinking, he threw in some bacon that was cooking in the kitchen at the time for good measure. And just like that, the Cobb salad was born. Cobb did not originally name the salad after himself, though; that opportunity was taken by one of the Hollywood Brown Derby's many celebrity clients. 

After Robert Cobb assembled his improvised salad, he was eager to see how customers would respond. Fortunately for him, a famous customer was already aware of this new recipe. At the time of the Hollywood Brown Derby's heyday, Sid Grauman was the famed name behind Grauman's Chinese Theatre, which had opened around the same time in 1927 on Hollywood Boulevard. Unlike the Brown Derby, the movie theater still exists today under the name TCL Chinese Theatre. Grauman was a major player in the Hollywood landscape with multiple successful movie theaters in operation at the time, so if there was something he enjoyed, word would certainly get around (via TCL Chinese Theatres).

Aware that Robert Cobb had concocted a new salad recipe the night before, Grauman ordered what he described as the "Cobb salad" for lunch. The salad was such a success that it was added to the menu at the Brown Derby, and the rest is history. It quickly became one of the most popular menu items at the restaurant, selling millions during the lifetime of the Hollywood Brown Derby.

While most generic salads can be tossed in any dressing of your choice, other kinds, like the Caesar salad, are clearly defined by their unique dressing. A Caesar salad with Italian dressing, for instance, simply does not work. There are some blurred lines, however, with respect to the Cobb salad. If you were to order a Cobb salad nowadays at your local restaurant, chances are high that it will come served with ranch dressing. But that was not the original dressing that Robert Cobb used on the original version. 

If you want to eat a truly authentic Cobb salad, you will want to ask for French dressing. If you want to be very specific, see if the restaurant has a red wine vinaigrette French dressing, which Cobb used at the Hollywood Brown Derby. Though, depending on who you ask, French dressing is synonymous with vinaigrette — but you can still word it as a red wine vinaigrette French dressing if you want to feel like you are ordering your Cobb salad like Hollywood elite.

There are a lot of unique aspects to a Cobb salad that you do not usually find in other salad varieties. Aside from the fact that the Cobb salad has a standard list of ingredients that most restaurants do not deviate from, the presentation of the salad is also different from many others you may order at a restaurant. One of the beauties of salads is that the ingredients are commonly tossed before being served, which gives whoever is eating it a nice mixture of flavors and textures. No two bites are quite the same.

But if you were to order a Cobb salad as it was originally prepared at the Hollywood Brown Derby, you would be served a plate full of its ingredients laid out in rows. The chicken, hard-boiled egg, tomato, avocado, and bacon bits would not be mixed at all. In some instances, your server might toss the salad once it reaches your table, but other restaurants might leave you to do the mixing yourself. Either way, the presentation of a Cobb salad is another unique aspect of this improvised dish that Robert Cobb concocted nearly a century ago.

The Cobb Salad as a dish has a happy ending. It is one of the most popular salads you can order at a restaurant and does not seem to show any signs of aging. Sadly, the same cannot be said for its original home, the Hollywood Brown Derby. The restaurant, which grew to four locations across Los Angeles, began to decline in popularity in the 1960s. Nearly decades after its first location opened on Wilshire, the Los Feliz Brown Derby closed its doors.

The original Wilshire location would be the next to close in 1980, with its famous domed entrance shuttered for good. The Beverly Hills location closed a couple of years later, and finally, the fourth Brown Derby in Hollywood closed in 1985, and that was the end of a dining era for Los Angeles. But not too long after all four Brown Derbys closed in California, a replica would soon open across the country. Through some old-school Hollywood wizardry and what some would describe as magic, the Hollywood Brown Derby can still be visited today.

The Cobb salad is a pretty common dish, available in various forms all over the country. But if you want a near-perfect replication of the original Cobb salad these days, one of the best places to order it is actually in Walt Disney World. In 1987, Disney entered a licensing agreement with the Brown Derby brand for a theme park that was in the works. The park, which was originally designed to be built around a working film studio, was called Disney-MGM Studios, which opened in 1989.

Now called Disney's Hollywood Studios, guests can dine at a replica version of the Hollywood Brown Derby, complete with its signature Cobb Salad that comes just as it did in the 1930s. The salad even includes Cobb's original French dressing, which was also licensed out to Disney. The Florida restaurant's menu even includes Grapefruit Cake, which was originally conceived by Robert Cobb in the 1920s for a dieting Louella Parsons. Just like its predecessor, the Hollywood Brown Derby in Disney World is one of the swankier restaurants you will find in its theme parks. So get ready to step back in time to the Golden Era of Hollywood when you make your reservation, and be sure to order its Cobb salad (via Walt Disney World).