U.S. soldier Phillip Sollomi returned from World War II with dreams of opening a restaurant with a great cocktail bar.
He probably never imagined that restaurant would become known not for its drinks, but for its Italian salad dressing.
At the Wish-Bone in Kansas City, Sollomi served up Manhattans and highballs alongside plates of fried chicken and prime rib. His menu also included salads, tossed with what Sollomi described as his mother Lena Sollomi’s family recipe from Sicily, a spicy blend of seasonings mixed with oil and vinegar.
In a town chockablock with fried chicken joints, the zesty salad dressing helped the Wish-Bone restaurant stand out.
It was different from the prevalent vinaigrette, commonly called French dressing at the time.
It was also unlike a traditional Italian-style dressing, typically made with only simple ingredients: a generous pour of olive oil, a splash of wine vinegar, a pinch of salt. No herbs. No spices.
Whether this so-called Sicilian recipe was legit or just a sales pitch that Sollomi concocted is the subject of much speculation.
Most of the Italian immigrants moving to the area in the 1890s through 1930s came from Sicily, and many of them preferred a “more spicy flavor to their food” compared to the bland American palate, according to Andrea Broomfield, author of Kansas City: A Food Biography, published in 2016.
“How this gets associated with Lena Sollomi as her recipe from Sicily, I don’t know that story,” says Broomfield, whose forthcoming book Lost Restaurants of Kansas City devotes an entire chapter to the Wish-Bone. “But my guess is there was some jazzing up of what had been her recipe.”
Authentic or not, Sollomi’s spiced-up dressing was a big hit in Middle America. It became so popular that Sollomi quit the fried chicken business entirely, selling the restaurant in 1952 and opening a factory to manufacture his salad dressing full-time. His Wish-Bone brand, with its patented wishbone-shaped bottle, grew into a powerhouse in the condiment aisles of U.S. supermarkets.
Sollomi’s success helped set the standard for what passes for Italian dressing in America. The style would be widely imitated and even surpass the French variety in popularity. But Sollomi can’t take all the credit for the rise of American-style Italian dressing.
Around the same time that Sollomi was mixing his dressing in a big drum out behind the Wish-Bone, another U.S. restaurant was getting attention for its own version of Italian salad dressing, based on similar claims about a secret family recipe from the Old World.
Like Sollomi, Ken Hanna, owner of Ken’s Steak House in Framingham, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, made a fortune by bottling his house salad dressing for sale in U.S. grocery stores.
While his name appeared on every bottle, the original “Ken’s” recipe was not his own. That credit goes to his wife, Florence Bacigalupo Hanna, the daughter of Italian immigrants from Genoa. She reputedly made the house dressing from scratch multiple times daily, using her mother’s recipe, which combined the traditional oil and vinegar with other seasonings like garlic and onion. “The salads became so popular; people were always getting refills,” Michael Hanna, one of the couple’s three sons, recalled in a self-published 2009 cookbook.
In 1958, the Hannas partnered with another couple in launching a side business, Ken’s Foods, bringing the Ken’s Steak House brand of salad dressing to supermarkets. “It just had a great flavor,” Louise Crowley, one of the partners, told the Boston Globe in 2002. “Not too sharp, not too oily.” From the beginning, the new company played up the Old World connection, first labeling it as “Homemade Italian Style” dressing, later shortened to simply “Italian.”
Comparing these two pioneering formulas is difficult today with the passage of time and probable changes from the original restaurant to manufactured versions. Visually, though, the two dressings look very different in the bottle. Ken’s is a clearer, more consistent liquid, closer in line to the simple Italian style, while Wish-Bone is heavily flecked with seasonings and requires a good shake prior to pouring.
Wish-Bone is perhaps the more influential of the two, spurring other dressing makers to pile on with seasonings and effectively turning the Old World’s basic oil-and-vinegar preparation into a spice rack-emptying arms race—much to the chagrin of Italian traditionalists. Bologna-born, California-based chef Biba Caggiano complained about the “false notion that Italian salad dressing should contain every possible herb and seasoning” in her book Biba’s Northern Italian Cooking. She blamed the trend on “television commercials for bottled and packaged dressings.”
Actress Anna Maria Alberghetti, seen here in a 1958 photo session, became known in America as “The Good Seasons Lady” for her TV commercials.
In fact, U.S. television is rife with examples. One 1982 spot for Good Seasons brand of mix-it-yourself Italian salad dressing, featuring the Tony Award-winning Italian-American actress Anna Maria Alberghetti, a.k.a. “the Good Seasons lady,” boasted that it contained “50% more herbs and spices” than the leading competitor and therefore “a lot more taste.”
Both originators have contributed to this evolution. Wish-Bone now produces seven different varieties of Italian dressing. Ken’s makes 10, including a “Chef’s Reserve” that contains pepperoncini peppers and asiago cheese. Ken’s also handles production for Paul Newman’s popular brand of dressings, Newman’s Own, including a “Family Recipe Italian,” which depicts the famed actor in a Florentine boater hat on the label and lists paprika and Worcestershire sauce among its many ingredients.
The original Wish-Bone restaurant, however, is long gone. It closed in 1978, while production of Wish-Bone salad dressing passed from its founder. It’s now part of food giant Conagra.
Meanwhile, Ken’s Steak House still stands. The restaurant remains family owned, run by the Hannas’ grandson, Tim Hanna Jr., who also maintains a sizable stake in the bottling business. Following Ken Hanna’s death in 1995, the family’s salad dressing empire became mired in drama, with his heirs and former business partners fighting in court over his estate and trademarks. The bottling business also ran into legal trouble in California over misleading claims about the amount of olive oil in its salad dressings.
Still, the steakhouse remains a mecca for salad fans. “That’s the No. 1 seller here, the house salad,” says executive chef Rick Brown, who originally worked for the Hannas as a teenager and later returned to run the kitchen. In its heyday, he noted, the restaurant would go through a whopping 50 cases of lettuce during a typical weekend.
Florence Hanna’s recipe for the house dressing is a “forbidden matter,” according to Brown, which the chef declines to discuss.