Warner Bros. Commissary Captain Dishes on Jennifer Aniston’s Special Salad and That Viral Vintage Menu
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It was 1941. Though World War II was already under way, film production was in full swing at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank.
Humphrey Bogart was getting ready to shoot “The Maltese Falcon,” while the next year, “Casablanca” would film on Warners soundstages and at the nearby Van Nuys airport, subbing for Morocco. Bette Davis was making “Now Voyager” on the lot after location visits to Lake Arrowhead and Laguna Beach.
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At the Warner Bros. Café, the studio’s commissary on the Burbank lot, James Cagney and Rita Hayworth lunched with director Raoul Walsh, while actor and future president Ronald Reagan dined with Olivia de Havilland — just a few of the major stars and filmmakers who could be seen taking a break from the hard work of filming.
These days, studio executives are big on Cobb salads and Kobe beef burgers. But back in the 1940s, the dense one-page menu featured dozens of selections to please the starry clientele. To start, imported caviar and foie gras were available, both for under a dollar. Seafood choices included an oyster pancake or fresh brook trout, while specials ranged from hot dogs with “Liberty cabbage” to a hot chicken liver sandwich on toast. The daily special on the Feb. 17, 1941 menu was a fried ham and egg sandwich on toast with “sno shu potatoes.” It’s hard to say, though, what went into the desserts called the Vitaphone, the Warner Brothers Theatre and the First National.
The menu is such a perfect time capsule that it has gone viral several times, most recently in January when Twitter users were enthusiastically deciding what to order from choices such as “Little Pig sausage” and “Fig juice.”
These days, the studio’s executive dining room, Avon Grill and cafeteria continue to serve hundreds of production workers, executives and performers each day. Harry Dashjian, a 23-year veteran of the studio and captain of the fine dining room, says he treasures the framed copy of the 1941 menu one of his frequent customers gave him. Dashjian says he was surprised to see the range of dishes on the vintage menu — “caviar, oysters… with prices in cents, not in dollars,” he marvels. “When they come in for deluxe tours, they take pictures of the menu.”
But just like in the days of Bogey and Bette, notable names are still lunching in the executive dining room, which reopened last summer after a two-year COVID shutdown.
“All the stars, they’re here,” says Dashjian. “Interesting people, powerful people, all the executives.” And not just entertainment industry diners — Dashjian remembers overseeing meals for the president of the Dominican Republic, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and a Saudi Arabian prince, who appreciated Dashjian’s Arabic language skills.
The dining room’s current menu combines longtime favorites like the chicken paillard salad with sun-dried tomatoes, olives and arugula with up-to-the-minute dishes like carrots marinated with ras-el-hanout and topped with lime espuma (foam); kale, quinoa and goat cheese salad and roasted peach and burrata with scallops. The sea bass with farro is also popular with the executives on the lot.
Hollywood being Hollywood, some diners inevitably ask for customized items. When “Friends” was shooting on the lot, Dashjian recalls, Jennifer Aniston had her own special “Jennifer Salad,” a bespoke combination of a Cobb salad and a chopped salad with diced tomatoes, garbanzo beans, chicken, salami and turkey bacon, topped with pecorino cheese. (The original Jennifer salad is not be be confused with the combo of quinoa, mint, chickpeas and feta that became popular on Tiktok as the Jennifer Aniston salad many years later.)
Dashjian, a beloved figure on the lot, came to Warners after working at popular French restaurant Robaire’s when he first came to Los Angeles, and then at Mistral in Sherman Oaks. He names Muhammad Ali, George Clooney, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jennifer Lopez as other customers he was always excited to see.
Anyone on the lot can eat in the sometimes-starry fine dining room, though Dashjian says reservations are preferred. The Avon Cafe and cafeteria serve casual fare to hundreds of studio workers each day, while the Central Perk café and two Starbucks keep employees sufficiently caffeinated. “An army marches on its stomach,” goes the saying, but over the past 100 years, it’s fair to say a film studio does too.
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