Think the West Coast's biggest icons are the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hollywood sign? The menu has a few landmarks of its own. A surprising number of American classics — from a pasta dish you'd swear was Italian to a rum cocktail with Tahitian roots — were actually dreamed up in California, and several of the original venues still serve them today.

Start with fettuccine alfredo. In the 1920s, silent film stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford honeymooned in Rome, fell for a buttery parmesan noodle dish, begged the chef for the recipe, and delivered it to Musso & Frank Grill in Hollywood — which has been serving it ever since. That makes LA the unlikely gateway for one of America's favourite comfort pastas.

Salad history runs deep here too. In 1937, Bob Cobb, owner of the Brown Derby in Los Angeles, raided his kitchen late one night and threw together bacon, blue cheese, hard-boiled eggs and whatever else he could find. Friend Sid Grauman of Grauman's Chinese Theatre fame loved it, asked for it by name, and the Cobb Salad entered the canon. A few years earlier, in 1923, Palace Hotel executive chef Philip Roemer created Green Goddess dressing in San Francisco to honour actor George Arliss, who was staying there while starring in a play of the same name. His French-inspired blend of Dijon, egg yolks, spinach, garlic, chives and tarragon is still served in the hotel's Garden Court — ideally over chilled Dungeness crab.

The drinks menu has a claim to fame as well. Victor Bergeron mixed the first Mai Tai at Trader Vic's in Emeryville in 1944, using 17-year-old Jamaican J. Wray Nephew rum, rock candy syrup, orange curaçao, French orgeat and lime over shaved ice. Tahitian friends who tried it declared it "mai tai, roa ae" — roughly, out of this world, the best. The drink went on to anchor the bars at Hawaii's Royal Hawaiian and Moana Surfrider hotels, and Trader Vic's also claims the crab rangoon from the same era.

Even dessert carries California DNA. Rocky Road — chocolate, nuts and marshmallows — appeared in Oakland in 1929, with a name tied to the Great Depression. Who invented it is genuinely disputed: Dreyer's gets most of the credit, but Fentons Creamery loyalists disagree. Order a scoop and pick a side.

For travellers, this is more than trivia. It's a ready-made food itinerary: a throwback dinner at Musso & Frank, a Cobb Salad where it was born, Green Goddess dressing at the Palace Hotel, a Mai Tai at Trader Vic's and a Rocky Road cone in Oakland. LA and the Bay Area sit a short flight (or a scenic coastal drive) apart, so you can eat your way through a century of culinary invention in one trip — and skip the usual tourist queue for a table with a story attached.