Walk into a major auction house this fall and you’re bound to run into a work by Les Lalannes. Often cited by their pluralized last name, the French designers Claude (1925–2019) and François-Xavier Lalanne (1927–2008) are beloved for second-wave Art Deco objets inspired by the natural world: hippo bars 🦛🍸, baboon fireplaces 🦍🔥, sheep stools 🐑, and ginkgo chairs 🍂🪑.

The duo maintained different specialties, and even kept separate studios echoing Claude’s recollection that criticism from one could cause the other to restart a project.1 Broadly, Claude focused more on flora and the human body, while François-Xavier specialized in fauna. The latter was more fond of making functional objects—in keeping with his famous line that “the supreme art is the art of living”—leading Claude to tease that he was “so afraid of being taken for an artist that he forced himself to make useful objects.”2 🫣🛋️

Claude Lalanne, *Choupatte (Très Grand)*, 2012. Sotheby’s October 2019

There are chicken cameos in their works, as egg cups, planters, and stand-alone sculptures. 🐣🌱But my favorite is Claude’s Choupatte: a cabbage with chicken feet. Made initially as a gift for François-Xavier (chou being a common French term of affection), the piece began initially as a cast of the hardy produce until Claude attached chicken feet to it, a move that she later described as providing a critical emotional element.3 🥬🐓

The humble brassicacea continued to inspire Claude with François-Xavier once joking that “the cabbage leaf is to Claude what the acanthus leaf was to Greek art.”4 Four years after Claude first exhibited Choupatte, she made L’Homme à la tête de chou (The Man with the Cabbage Head, 1968), which would famously serve as Serge Gainsbourg’s fictional muse. The French crooner apparently walked by Galerie Alexandre Iolas fifteen times before purchasing it, then installed the sculpture at his home on rue de Verneuil, where it “told” him the plot that would inform his 1976 album L’Homme à tête de chou.5🥬🕴🏻🎵

In the album, Gainsbourg offers a contemporary update on the tale of Carmen, narrating the story of a journalist who becomes obsessed with a young stylist. His jealousy curdles into violence: he murders her with a fire extinguisher then descends into psychosis, convinced that his own head has turned into a cabbage. Which does make me wonder what might have happened had he brought home any of Ugo Rondinone’s Moonrise sculptures instead…

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The Lalannes also cooked prolifically and even contributed to Daniel Spoerri’s Le Dîner Cannibale, held at his Eat Art Galerie in Düsseldorf,where they served vol-au-vents cast from François-Xavier’s body.6🥧🦵🏻

But the leaf + chicken combo made me think of a less anthropophagic dish: the Chicken Caesar Wrap, which has joined matcha and avocado toast in the What Is Wrong With Millennials^TMdiscourse.7 Tammie Teclemariam’s 2022 Grub Street piece proclaimed the wrap at Bobwhite Counters as NYC’s best, while my informal poll produced multiple Lenwich loyalists. But, my perhaps polarizing personal pick is Ploo in Olly Olly Market in the Starrett-Lehigh building in Chelsea.

The pinnacle of human achievement? Photo: Irate Chicken

Ploo’s version is a true Gesamtkunstwerk for me. It is a belief system, a social contract and, as far as I’m concerned, a luminous beacon in a sea of irrational consumer options. Here’s my seven-part impassioned defense: 1. this is the chicken they use in their tacos so it is actually seasoned; 2. there is pickled cabbage, onion and pico for perfect acidity; 3. the buttery-soft tortilla is properly warmed on the flat-top; 4. the sauce always comes on the side (mock me, for I will revel in the ability to modulate my sauce intake);5. the Olly Olly bar sells $12 Happy Hour martinis with a sidecar, which is a perfect accompaniment; 6. the building has clean bathrooms and good Wi-Fi making it the only reasonable place to work in between gallery visits and openings in Chelsea; 7. there is an excellent reward program and can you tell me in 2026 that you’d pass on a loyalty program?♨️🌯💰

“Your obsession with this wrap makes me vaguely concerned for your wellbeing.” –Tim Schneider, the François-Xavier to my Claude

There is also some logic to getting your Caesar from a Mexican-leaning restaurant. The Italian immigrant and restauranteur Caesar Cardini is often credited as inventing the dish in 1924 at his Tijuana restaurant.8 Then Manny Wolf, the head of the writer’s department at Paramount Pictures, apparently brought the recipe back to LA in the late 1930s, and a decade later the dish became all the rage in Hollywood.9 🎥🥗By 1995, the salad had become so ubiquitous that the Washington Post declared, “Chicken Caesar Salad has become the yuppie equivalent to a burger and fries.”10

But how did the Caesar go from an improvisational dish in Tijuana to a wrap available at a JFK vending machine? All fingers point to one Melinda Lou Thomas, aka the face that launched a thousand burgers at Wendy’s. Wrap culture was already thriving in the 90s thanks to newly health conscious consumers and the on-the-go corporate lunch culture.11By 1997, fast food chains such as KFC, Taco Bell, and Long John Silvers gleefully hopped on the trend.12 Of these, Wendy’s notably debuted the Chicken Caesar Pita, bringing what they called “a fresh, new approach to lunch” to mass drive throughs to appeal to salad consumers.🍗🥗🥙

Fast-forward three decades and it looks like this yuppie dish never went away, unlike blue ketchup and clear Pepsi. Instead, an April 2026 Vox article described the Chicken Caesar wrap as “comfort food for a swath of burnt-out millennials,” owing to early aughts mall food court culture (of which Wendy’s remained ever present) and subsequently as a dish my generation has remained “feral for.”13👹

Still, I don’t think any of our love for the Chicken Caesar wrap quite matches Gainsbourg’s ferality for cabbage man—and perhaps that’s a good thing, since none of us is about to bash another customer with a fire extinguisher…right?

Never missing an excuse to share this vid of Gainsbourg being serenaded by schoolboys. Screenshots collaged from this YouTube video.

Ploo: 7/5 for all reasons outlined above.

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1

They did occasionally make work together—see Pomme de Ben (2007) at Christie’s Paris. Helen Chislett, “Two Chances to Step into Claude Lalanne’s Wonderland,” Financial Times, 3 September 2016.

2

See Les Lalanne, exh. cat. (1975).

3

Chislett, “Two Chances to Step into Claude Lalanne’s Wonderland.”

4

Daniel Marchesseau, Les Lalanne (1998), 31. Later cabbage hybrids include Lapin Chou and Enfant à la Tête de chou.

5

Laurent Balandras, Les Manuscrits de Serge Gainsbourg: Brouillons, dessins et inédits (2011), 256–257.

6

Heidi E. Violand-Hobi, Daniel Spoerri: Biographie und Werk (Munich, London and New York: Prestel, 1998), 58–59; Géraldine Girard-Fassier, ed., Daniel Spoerri Presents Eat Art (2004). Vol-au-vents will be the subject of a future Irate Chicken post!

7

Alex Abad-Santos, “The Diabolical, Millennial Obsession with Chicken Caesar Wraps,” Vox, 21 April, 2026.

8

Caroline Hatchett, “Happy 100th to Caesar Salad, Born in Mexico and Celebrated Worldwide” The Washington Post, 5 August, 2024.

9

Aline Mosby, “Chef Who Invented Caesar Salad Frowns on Apers,” San Mateo Times, 16 June, 1952.

10

Andrew Schloss, “Can’t Stand the Heat? Some Icy Ideas for Chilling Out: Salad as Entree—Anything Goes,” The Washington Post, 2 August 1995.

11

San Francisco’s World Wrapps claims to have invented the commercial “wrap” category in the 90s. See India Mandelkern, “The Bros Who Disrupted the Sandwich,” Eater, 4 December 2017.

12

Greg Johnson, “A New Twist,” Los Angeles Times, 15 May, 1997.

13

Abad-Santos, “The Diabolical, Millennial Obsession with Chicken Caesar Wraps.”

Irate Chicken #7: Just the “Chou” of Us