Why It Works
- Briefly rinsing the onion under warm (not hot) water washes away the sulfur compounds responsible for its potent bite, leaving behind its natural sweetness and aroma.
- Mixing the sugar and seasonings into the vinegar before whisking in the mayo ensures they dissolve fully.
- Resting the finished dressing in the fridge overnight allows the onion and garlic volatile flavor compounds to mellow and dissolve into the dressing, delivering a cohesive, rounded flavor.
Last summer, for one night only, Akron, Ohio’s minor league baseball team, the RubberDucks, rebranded as the Akron White French. It was an in-joke for Akronites—one that most of the country wouldn’t get. “White French is still pretty much specific to Akron,” says chef Vinnie Cimino, who serves the creamy, mayonnaise-based salad dressing at his Cleveland restaurant, Cordelia.
Cimino lives in Akron, his hometown, and commutes forty-five minutes to the restaurant. That’s further than white French usually travels. “We have a lot of Akron folks who come up to Cleveland, and they’re so excited to see white French on the menu,” he says. “I don’t know if anybody else in Cleveland has it.”
As a native Ohioan from another part of the state, I’d never had it until I ordered the signature “overdressed greens,” a pizza parlor–inspired salad, at Cordelia last year. Curious, I called Cimino recently to learn more.
“It’s the best freaking dressing there is,” Cimino told me. He shared the basic building blocks: mayonnaise, sugar (sometimes lots), vinegar (usually white), onions, garlic, white pepper, and salt. Think souped-up buttermilk dressing, or ranch with no herbs and more sugar. He also suggested I talk to Ken Stewart, a former boss of his who owns three eponymous restaurants in Akron.
Stewart didn’t create the dressing, but he’s done as much as anyone to popularize it over the past thirty years. When I got him on the phone, he gave me a brief history, as he understood it.
According to Stewart and decades of newspaper archives, it started with Stouffer’s—sort of. The long-closed Stouffer’s restaurant chain, founded in Cleveland and best known for the frozen foods it left behind, was the first to serve a version of white French dressing in northeastern Ohio. “It was fabulous,” Stewart says. “Nobody here had heard of white French otherwise.”
Serious Eats / Vy Tran
But the Stouffer’s recipe, which has been published many times, is not Akron-style white French as we know it today. Like other midcentury French dressing recipes, it’s a sweet vinaigrette stabilized with cornstarch. It’s “white” because it’s tomato-free and light on the paprika.
When Stewart bought Foley’s Restaurant, which then became Ken Stewart’s, in 1990, it came with a recipe for a new kind of white French—likely inspired by Stouffer’s, but with a mayonnaise base. “Harry Foley said, ‘Look, I’ve got this fabulous dressing and I’m going to give you the recipe for it,'” Stewart says. “Lots of people have tried to duplicate it since. They’ve come close, but no cigar. It’s a nice balance between sweet and acidic. And there’s onion and a touch of garlic in it. There’s a touch of white pepper. There are a couple other little ingredients that I choose not to give out.”
While researching the dressing, I came across a four-year-old comment on a white French recipe from a “Mike Sicilain” who said he was a sous chef at Foley’s. He wrote that Foley’s chef Charles Schaeffer created today’s white French, and that he—Sicilain—took it to Papa Joe’s, another local institution known for its version, when he started working there in 1988. I couldn’t confirm that, but it aligns with Stewart’s story.
In any case, if you look at newspaper coverage, it seems like Akron’s appreciation for white French really took off in the Ken Stewart era. By 2003, when then Beacon-Journal food writer Jane Snow came up with a Ken Stewart’s copycat recipe, it was a beloved taste of the city, like sauerkraut balls. (Snow’s recipe has become one of the newspaper’s most requested.) “People are crazy about this stuff,” Snow wrote.
Now, at Cordelia, diners are going crazy for it all over again. Of course, Cimino’s white French isn’t just a copy-and-paste. The chef, a 2025 James Beard finalist and one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs, has his own take: “It starts with the best products available to us,” he says. “When they’re in season, we use candy onions, which are extra-sweet. Otherwise, we use the best sweet onions we can find. We use organic garlic from Hudson, Ohio. We use Duke’s mayonnaise, which has a little extra vinegar brightness. And we use house-made apple cider vinegar, not white. Ours also has a little bit of Bertman Ball Park Mustard,” a Cleveland classic.
With some guidance from Cimino, I came up with my own version. Like its inspiration, it has a twangy, sweet-tart flavor backed by a fresh allium punch and warm notes of mustard and white pepper. (One lesson I learned in testing: Don’t skip the overnight rest. Those flavors need time to mellow.)
For Akronites, this is an all-purpose dressing. At Cordelia, it isn’t just on the house salad—it’s also a base for coleslaw and other creamy deli-case “salads.” Cimino also recommends folding it into a Japanese-style potato salad. Stewart says it’s a utility player in his restaurants, too: “We have customers who use it as a sauce for steak.”
