Best Cobb Salad

The Cobb salad was invented at the old Hollywood Brown Derby when owner Bob Cobb, faced with either an overfull refrigerator or a starlet with troublesome bridgework, chopped the elements of a standard chef's salad into chunks no larger than a pea. He was always a couple of steps ahead, that guy, just as you would have to be if your fortune was based on chiffon cake and the Hollywood Stars baseball team. A great Cobb salad is less a feat of cuisine than an exercise in customization: If you can't express exact preferences on chopped bacon, chopped avocado, chopped chicken or chopped egg yolk, tossed or not tossed, dressing mixed in with the salad or meted out on the side, you probably don't belong in Hollywood. It may seem like a modest innovation, chopping a chef's salad, but Cobb salads were on the menu of practically every restaurant in America through the '60s, and continue to this day not just at the Hamburger Hamlet but in, say, the Asian-inflected Thai Cobb salad at Tiara. The Brown Derby is long gone, but the time-honored Beverly Hills Hotel variant known as the McCarthy Salad, which includes shredded cheddar cheese and beets, is permanently on the lunch menu at the Polo Lounge — no matter how much the establishment may prefer to feed you warm goat cheese or ahi tartare.—Jonathan Gold