Caesar Salads: The Point is in the Dressing

Bizu Caesar Salad

March 6, 2010 – Bizu, Greenhills – There are staples you order that never change. You get a shrimp Thermidor today. Salpicao, the next. Canard in a few more visits. Or a chicken dish further down. You thumb through the menu and promise – like I always do when I find a really good restaurant – to try everything until the list is exhausted and you move on. Doña Nena’s Caesar salad was that quintessential dish I kept coming back to.

Coddled eggs, a touch of acid (lemon juice and wine vinegar), olive oil, Worcestershire sauce, cheese and anchovies (how can anyone hate these?) are the only requisites for any true Caesar salad dressing. I order these excitedly, and the waiter comes in with a trolley of all these ingredients to show you just how a proper salad is made. Break some eggs in a wooden bowl, and add the other ingredients only at the right moment.

It’s been years since the restaurant ceased to be. I don’t see the trolley anymore. But I still order the same thing at every other restaurant looking for tell-tale signs of yolk from a real Caesar dressing. Today’s dressings are bottled with yogurt, artificial emulsifiers and non-fat subsitutes. White, healthy(?) and repulsive. Restaurants adorn their salad with chopped nuts, fancy croutons and shaved cheese, but I still taste the bottled dressing.

I came back from dinner at Bizu with runfastrussia and themarklim. Of course, we ordered the Caesar salad. I don’t know how it was made, but the dressing was yellow and heavenly.

Thanks to themarklim for contributing these photos, and runfastrussia for great conversations.