Friday, April 11, 2014

Flashback Fridays #3

So here is another Flashback Friday, and this one will involve a very interesting item. It seems that I have written so far about a person, a place, and now I find it appropriate to write about a thing. Categorizing things by types of nouns is quite fun.

So here is the next historical fact...







#3 The Cobb Salad




The Brown Derby was a chain of restaurants that ruled Hollywood from the 1920s to the 1950s. Hollywood elite constructed and formed their major scandals and stories within these four restaurants. However I am not here to talk about that. What I am here for, are the Cobb salad stories.








The Brown Derby at Hollywood and Vine had a lot of historical rumors attached to it. It is supposedly where Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons ate at, and where Clark Gable proposed to Carole Lombard. It is also where the Cobb salad originated from.




I've read different stories based on how to Cobb came to be. The first one was that it was late and the restaurant was closing up. A regular, and a good friend of the owner Robert Cobb, walked in and asked for something to fill him up. There wasn't a lot of food left, since it was the end of the day and they were packing up, so the chef, Chuck Wilson, simply used what was left. When the friend asked what the salad was, the chef replied, "a Cobb salad".



Another story was that the famous Sid Grauman,  founder of the Pantages, Grauman's Chinese theater, as well as others, came in and asked for something that didn't require a lot of chewing due to the fact he had dental surgery.  The result was the Cobb Salad. 



It is disputed whether chef, Chuck Wilson, or owner, Robert Cobb were the founders or creators of the salad, but whatever the answer is, it came from the fantastic building. Sadly the building experienced fire damage in 1987, riot damage in 1992, and overall the complete wreckage in the late 2010s. The building is completely gone now, and all that is left is a parking lot (on the bottom of this article). The Cobb Salad is an item owned by Hollywood history, and, it takes its place as third flashback friday.













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