The chicken Caesar wrap, once relegated to the prepared section at dingy golf course cafeterias and the B-sides of fluorescent-lit deli menus, has shed its trappings of the ’90s wrap boom. In Los Angeles, the wrap has morphed into a signifier of cultural
cachet, a line-inducing menu siren worthy of pre-orders and online drops. And for restaurants, especially those where a Caesar wrap wouldn’t usually be found, the dish has become a new, needed way to get people in the door.
Although the Caesar salad has long been an iconic mainstay at LA restaurants such as the now-closed Horses and Dan Tana’s, the recent fervor around the Caesar wrap can likely be traced back to Ggiata, an Italian American delicatessen operated by Noah Holton-Raphael, Max Bahramipour, and Jack Biebel that has become a cult favorite for its cheese-laced take on a chicken Parmesan, the Spicy P, along with other heavily-stacked sandwiches. “Growing up in New Jersey, the Caesar wrap was on all of the neighborhood deli menus that we grew up going to, but it was never the sexiest food item,” says Holton-Raphael. “Really, it was a country club food, and we were ordering it because it was nostalgic and familiar, not because it was this exciting culinary expression.” Ggiata’s chicken Caesar wrap was born out of a conversation the team had in 2022 with Eduardo Ruiz, of Burritos La Palma and Mejorado, about his plans for a tortilla wholesale business. Ruiz emphasized that he hoped to bring his tortillas to more non-Mexican restaurants, which sparked an idea for Ggiata.
Ggiata’s Caesar wrap tortillas are a far cry from what Holton-Raphael remembers growing up — flaky Mission tortillas served straight out of the package. “It was bleached white flour, not a ton of flavor, certainly no lard, which is what makes the Mejorado tortilla so good,” Holton-Raphael says.
Ggiata first added the wrap to the menu as part of its monthly specials lineup in March 2024; in its first hour of availability, it became one of the restaurant’s top-sellers. “We were so in and above our heads at that point that launching an item with a crazy sales impact on day one; we just weren’t prepared to handle that,” Holton-Raphael says. “But it was obviously a privilege and blessing for us to have to go through the process of rebuilding the systems and outfitting the restaurants to be able to do such a high-volume item.” The team quickly realized that the Caesar wrap was not going to be a fleeting item — it was about to become a staple of the restaurant. “Within two weeks we knew that if we took it off the menu, something bad was going to happen,” Holton-Raphael says.
Ggiata’s Caesar wrap was built off the same tenets as the rest of its menu, “good bread and good spread,” says Holton-Raphael. The restaurant doesn’t try to reinvent the wrap; still, all the ingredients, from the creamy-salty, anchovy-laden dressing that coats the Romaine to the pliant tortilla, swing in at a higher-quality level than the usual deli suspects. The Caesar dressing gets made in-house and paired with freshly shaved Parmesan, while sesame baguettes get torn by hand and baked to transform into croutons. The chicken, available grilled or crispy and fried, gets loaded into the wrap while still hot, instead of coming out of a refrigerator.
For Holton-Raphael, the Caesar wrap has become a way to introduce customers to Ggiata. Now that the virality has slowed down, he’s still excited when someone says they discovered the restaurant on social media for the wrap, but came back for the rest of the menu. “I think the hardest thing in restaurants in general is keeping the folks that come through the door for the first time,” says Holton-Raphael.
The popularity of the Caesar wrap could be a reflection on the wider restaurant industry. Holton-Raphael says there exists a sense of “paranoia” for restaurant operators who are cooking more regional cuisine or who may have a smaller customer market. “They feel like they need to have something like a Caesar wrap on their menu because that’s ultimately what is going to get people through doors,” Holton-Raphael says. “That’s what people want to eat.” He points to the “Hillstone-ification” of restaurants as an example. “The most amazing part of the LA dining scene is just how robust the culinary offering is — you can get something amazing from every corner of the world in this city,” Holton-Raphael says.
Armen Martirosyan, who joined his parents Ovakim and Alvard Martirosyan at the decades-old Glendale Armenian institution Mini Kabob in 2015, points to Ggiata as a primary inspiration for his own wildly popular Caesar wrap. After the 2025 Eaton Fire, Martirosyan was cooking at the Highland Park Ggiata for a fundraiser when he began talking about the power of the Caesar wrap with Holton-Raphael. As soon as Martirosyan got back to Glendale, he made the first version of his Caesar wrap and teased it on social media. Soon after, Foodbeast posted about the wrap on social media, which quickly blew up online. “It went super viral,” Martirosyan says.
At Mini Kabob, Martirosyan wanted to ensure the wrap felt true to the restaurant’s origins. “I think the most important thing was every time I had a Caesar salad or some Caesar wrap, I hated it because I didn’t think there was any depth,” he says. “I didn’t think there was any flavor. I’m just very particular; for me, it’s a lot of umami. I need it to pop.” Martirosyan’s first thought went to the falafel that Mini Kabob already serves, which he broke down into smaller pieces and fried to turn into croutons to add to the wrap’s texture. Next came the dressing, which began as a more classic anchovy and egg emulsion, and was eventually rebuilt around a base of the restaurant’s garlic sauce. Chicken thighs soak in a dairy-based marinade to tenderize, before they hit the grill until dark flavor lines adorn their sides. “There’s just so much depth of flavor that it’s still representative of what Mini Kabob is, but it’s a Caesar wrap now,” Martirosyan says.
When Mini Kabob first dropped its Caesar wrap in June 2025, Martirosyan had no expectations of how it would be received. “I was like, ‘My business is okay. We have two, three employees. We’ll be fine, and it’s not going to go crazy,’” he says. Immediately, Martirosyan’s expectations were blown; he remembers one drop where the floodgates opened, and orders immediately flew past the 120 he intended to cap them at. On an anniversary trip in Santa Barbara with his wife at the time, they returned a day early to start prepping the wraps for service. “That’s when I knew it had taken on a life of its own. And ever since that day, progressively we’ve sold over a hundred a day.”
Mini Kabob’s Caesar wrap has brought a whole new demographic into the restaurant. Martirosyan says that, previously, most of his guests were between 28 and 45, but now he’s seeing 17-, 18-, and 19-year-olds coming in specifically for the falafel-pocked wrap. The wrap has grown to encompass between 25 and 27 percent of the restaurant’s business. Martirosyan adds that while many customers come for the Caesar wrap, they end up trying more of the menu and making return visits. “At the end of the day, it brings them into the doors,” he says.
Martirosyan feels conflicted about the Caesar wrap’s popularity, especially in the context of how long Mini Kabob has been around: “People are like, ‘Oh, is this where the world-famous Caesar wrap is? And I’m like, ‘It’s fucked up that my family business has been around for 40 years and now we’re defined by a fucking Caesar wrap that just went viral.’” But he says, “I’m like, ‘Hey, I’ll take it because no ego.’” He juxtaposes the recent success against the years that his parents’ business struggled while they sold chicken Kyiv and beef stroganoff to keep business afloat.
In May 2026, seafood restaurant Broad Street Oyster Company jumped onto the Caesar train, launching a lobster-studded wrap available exclusively at the Malibu location. A TikTokposted by the restaurant has garnered more than 130,000 likes. Comments on the video seem effusive: “I need this…biblically,” one commenter said, while another wrote, “This would heal me.” For the Broad Street wrap, a tower of Caesar bathed in an anchovy-heavy dressing gets topped with clumps of tender lobster and wrapped in a stretchy tortilla that requires two hands to hold each half. Caesar dressing comes on the side for dunking, though, since the wrap already arrives well-dressed, it may feel indulgent. The wrap grew in popularity over the summer, with a video from creator How Kev Eats garnering another 16,000 likes. Today, it remains on the menu at Malibu and as an off-menu special at Grand Central Market.
At East Hollywood’s Bridgetown Roti, the Caesar wrap began as banter between co-founders Malique Smith and Rashida Holmes after seeing the success of Ggiata and Mini Kabob. “I think it gives you a bit of a spark as a business in California,” Smith says. He remembers joking about the wrap that night with Holmes; every time they mentioned a jerk Caesar, people’s eyes would widen. The sudden interest piqued Smith’s attention because, for him, it didn’t feel all that different from what they already had on the menu under the “roti” section. Oddly, as soon as they called it a “wrap,” the response was different. The joke tumbled into a plan and, soon, Holmes reconstructed a Caesar wrap through the eyes of Bridgetown Roti. “We were going through our specials timeline, and we just were like, okay, summer’s around the corner, July’s really slow for restaurants, let’s do something special with this wrap,” Smith says.
For Bridgetown Roti’s partners, it was important for a Caesar wrap to express the restaurant’s vision and identity. “No matter what we do, we have to have a layer that feels like us,” Smith says. “If I just serve a chicken wrap that had regular croutons and regular Caesar dressing, I think our core customer base would maybe look at it with a sort of raised eyebrow. We already get the claims of being a gentrified version of Caribbean food from people who are from the Caribbean, so that wouldn’t have helped us.”
Instead of a tortilla, Bridgetown Roti builds its Caesar wrap on a flaky roti, which appears across the menu filled with curry chicken and red pepper goat. The Caesar dressing gets made with salt cod, while the croutons are crispy pieces of coco bread; classic Romaine lettuce and shaved Parmesan round out the wrap. “It’s like the Virgil Abloh rule,” Smith says. “You change something three percent, and it’s like, ‘Oh my God, you’ve created something completely new.’” But outside of that three percent, Smith says that customers are often less likely to try something new or unfamiliar to them.
“Rashida is maybe my favorite chef in the city, and I think what they’re doing is genius,” Holton-Raphael says of Bridgetown Roti’s wrap. “It’s differentiated and unique enough that people are going to come to try that from all over the city. Then when they get to Bridgetown, they’re going to see incredible patties in the warmer, and they’re going to see the rotis coming out of the kitchen.”
The response to the wrap so far has been positive, but it has also pushed Smith to consider what people look for from restaurants. “It makes me wonder, are we doing too much?” he says. “Should we simplify and maybe just call our rotis wraps? I mean, people say that anyway when they walk in — they don’t even bother to say ‘roti.’” Smith likens the desire for Caesar wraps to a shoe drop or catching a new Pokémon, where people seek out the most talked-about new thing. In the days after Bridgetown Roti announced its wrap, customers began asking if it would be permanent on the menu. “Are you kidding me?” Smith says. “Have I been busting my butt making the wrong types of wraps for years?”
Still, Smith and Holmes had to balance the desire to experiment with not feeling like they were selling out with a chicken Caesar wrap. “I think chef joked about this in the beginning of [the announcement] video,” Smith says. “She was like, ‘I sold my soul to the Caesar wrap.’ Essentially, we kind of did, but it was a test. It’s a test for us to see, hey, maybe if California was more of our thing, will we be more successful?” He adds that the summer was especially slow, especially around the July heat wave; on one Sunday, profits were half of what the restaurant usually saw. “You got to find a way to tread the water,” Smith says. “If it wasn’t for events and catering, we’d be in trouble.”
As restaurants navigate this ongoing moment of the Caesar wrap, Martirosyan still feels an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the attention and business it has brought. “My dad used to sell clothes and then cook all day when he came to the country. My mom used to clean homes, and I used to go with her while she was cleaning homes,” he says. “For me to ever sit there and bat an eye at why our business is doing well right now because of the Caesar wrap, I’d be foolish.”
Disclosure: Rashida Holmes is related to Eater editor Mona Holmes, who has no business connection to the company and was not involved in the compilation, editing, or publication of this story.
