Free Anonyponymous by John Bemelmans Marciano

epoque Europe, most fortuitously Monaco’s Grand Hotel, where Ritz met chef Auguste Escoffier. Escoffier had worked his way up through the finest kitchens in France, including a brief stint as the chef de cuisine of the French army during the Franco-Prussian war. (It might’ve gone better had the troops been hungrier, as the conflict was, even by the lowest of French standards, an epic catastrophe.)
    Ritz and Escoffier became a team, and their decade of success at London’s Savoy Hotel emboldened César to lease a palace on the Place Vendôme, the most fashionable square in Paris, and open the Hotel Ritz in 1898. Its success was instantaneous and sensational, and Ritz itself became the international byword for luxury. “Putting on the Ritz” meant to dress up swell, and the verb to ritz meant to put on airs. It could also have meant to reach the pinnacle of your profession and then suffer a complete mental breakdown, which is what happened to poor César, who would spend the last two decades of his life in convalescence while Escoffier cemented his reputation as the greatest French chef in history.
    ORIGINAL RECIPES
    In 1892–1893, one of the guests at the London Savoy was the great soprano Nellie Melba; during this time Escoffier is credited with naming not one but two famous dishes after her. Melba toast hardly needed Escoffier’s genius to be invented; when Nellie had a spell under the weather it was the one thing she could eat, but with Escoffier’s imprimatur even this blandest of items took on the sheen of high elegance. Rather more rich is the dessert he created in the diva’s honor, peach melba.
    Examples of epicurean homages abound, from General Tso’s chicken to beef carpaccio, named after a nineteenth-century military man from Hunan province and a Renaissance-era painter from Venice, respectively. Rarer is the case of the honoree actually having something to do with the dish named after him or her, but they do exist.
    A year or so after Melba’s stay at the Savoy, a young stockbroker on the opposite side the pond walked into another storied hotel, the Waldorf, nursing a wicked hangover. To make himself feel better, Lemuel Benedict, like Dame Nellie, ordered toast, except Benedict asked for it to be loaded with bacon and a poached egg, plus some hollandaise sauce on the side, please. Knowing a good thing when he saw one, the Waldorf ’s young maître d’hôtel, Oscar Tschirky, substituted ham and an English muffin for bacon and toast and put eggs Benedict on the hotel menu. Oscar of the Waldorf (as he would become known) stayed on the job fifty years and, though not a chef, created veal Oscar and the Waldorf salad, made Thousand Island dressing an American staple, and wrote a bestselling cookbook.
    Thirty years later, over on the West Coast, Prohibition would prove a boom time for Mexico, as Americans who wanted to liquor up legally had to travel south of the border to party. Cesare Cardini, an Italian restaurateur in San Diego, saw the opportunity and opened a restaurant in Tijuana, where in 1924 he created a salad of romaine lettuce, croutons, and Parmesan cheese with an olive-oil-and-egg-based dressing (but no anchovies). Caesar’s salad became a favorite among the movie-star set, who brought it back home with them.
    Another imported dish with a Hollywood imprimatur dates to the 1920 marriage of Douglas Fairbanks to Mary Pickford, the original Brangelina. For their honeymoon, the bride and groom visited Rome, where they stopped one night at the restaurant of Alfredo di Lelio. They fell in love with his signature fettuccine dish and, like many an American before and since, came home from Italy raving about the food they ate. But unlike for the rest of us, other people cared. (You can still get a fettuccine Alfredo at di Lelio’s restaurant; the authentic version is made with heaps of butter and Parmesan cheese.)
    The latter half of the roaring twenties saw two Brown Derby eateries open in Los