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Adding chicken, argued Anthony Bourdain, is a surefire way to ruin a Caesar salad. It’s no surprise, then, that chicken Caesar salad was one of 14 things he advised avoiding ordering at a restaurant. In a 2016 interview with First We Feast, when asked if he had any personal tell-tale signs that make him think “this place is legit” upon walking into a restaurant, the chef-slash-writer responds by providing the contrary: “Look, if you see a chicken Caesar on the menu, you know that somebody’s made compromises.”
With that said, his motivation behind the tip was way less cautionary than his reasons for skipping swordfish and cautioning against hollandaise sauce. “Hold the chicken” is a preference more based on opinion than food safety (fellow celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay chows down on chicken Caesar salads, after all). More specifically, Bourdain’s salad stance is based in piety to tradition and in minimalist reverence for letting a knockout Caesar dressing function as the lone star of the show.
As Bourdain wrote in his “Appetites: A Cookbook” at the very beginning of his Caesar salad recipe: “Another reason to love Mexico — unless you insist on putting sad, overcooked, characterless strips of grilled chicken cutlet on top of it and mashing it down into landfill. God does not want you to put chicken in your Caesar.” Neither did the salad’s original inventor, who didn’t even invent the dish in Rome. Italian-born restaurateur Cesare Cardini created his namesake salad in Mexico (as Bourdain alluded to in the cookbook quip).
Chicken, per Bourdain, does not belong on a Caesar salad
As the tale goes, the year was 1924, and U.S. Prohibition was in full swing. To bypass the strict alcohol laws, Cesare Cardini packed up his eponymous California restaurant (Anglicized to “Caesar’s”) and relocated to Tijuana. The joint was a smash, and during one fabled, particularly busy weekend, the kitchen ran out of the ingredients for a popular salad on the menu. In response, Cardini invented a new salad from whatever leftover ingredients were available.
Enter the Caesar salad. Good news travels fast, and by the 1940s, the dish had accrued a global fanbase. The original Caesar salad didn’t include chicken, and neither, argued Anthony Bourdain, should any Caesar salad, ever. In 1953, the International Society of Epicures in Paris named the Caesar salad “the greatest recipe to originate in the Americas in 50 years,” according to the BBC — a globally renowned title the dish earned without the addition of chicken. The best Caesars, according to the chef, are served sans pollo.
Bourdain’s personal recipe for the ultimate Caesar salad, as it appears in “Appetites,” proffers an elevated reimagination of the dish’s traditional prep. His dressing is a fully loaded, dimensional blend of EVOO, oil-packed anchovies (drained), grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, salt and pepper, Dijon mustard, lemon juice, three egg yolks, an unconventional dash of Tabasco, and lots of garlic. To finish, the salad gets garnished with homemade croutons transformed from white sandwich bread and 16 boquerone fillets (white vinegar-cured anchovies, oil-packed and drained). No chicken here.
