The Dish: Caesar salad from Rivertown Taps in Phoenixville, Pa.

Time now for the dish, and today we head to historic Phoenixville to make a classic, a favorite of mine and many fans, a Caesar salad. Alicia Vitarelli is here with the delicious details, and Alicia, the spot is called Rivertown Taps? Yeah, with the emphasis on the word taps, because when they say it, they mean it. There are dozens of drinks, beer and beyond, on tap at Phoenixville's first self-serve drink tap wall. The food is all locally sourced, and that Caesar salad is always a hit. We're a very beer-centric town, and we're beer-centric people, so we wanted to have a really curated selection. At Rivertown Taps on Bustling Bridge Street in historic Phoenixville, Louis Leiderman boasts the borough's first tap wall. Basically your adult soda machine. Yeah, yeah. It's like the best vending machine ever, and it has everything from an Aperol spritz down to... Milk spouts, IPAs, sours, ciders, a little bit of something for everybody. Just grab a charge card, choose your glassware, and choose your own adventure with 36 drink options on tap. Open the tap. OMG. And you pay for whatever you pour by the ounce. The building dates back to the 1800s, and Leiderman made sure to preserve pieces of that history while bringing something super fresh to the Strip. We make pastas from scratch. We extrude all of our own pastas in-house. We do all of our fresh filled pastas all by hand. We make all of our own breads. Everything that's in here is from scratch. And his mission includes a commitment to locally sourced food. The stuff that we're going to be using today is primarily from Hill Creek Farm over in Botstown. Today we're making a house favorite, the Caesar salad with a twist. I hate chasing croutons around a salad. You know, like the fork never kind of sticks into it. Yes. So what we did was we took some of our old sourdough bread that we make in-house. We kind of toast it up and make it kind of like a coarse panko texture. So this is like the universal goes everywhere throughout the salad crouton. We like to feature seasonal vegetables in our Caesar salad just for a little bit more flavor and nutrition. So he grills up some nice asparagus, then adds some protein. I also love a soft boiled egg on a Caesar salad. Me too. So, you know, just a little, you know, more sustenance to a salad to add a little bit of heartiness to it. The build starts with a mix of greens. We do a red romaine. So they're really high in antioxidants. They still have a romaine crisp texture that you're looking for in a Caesar salad. And then we do a ruby roe mini. And then we also blend it with a little bit of red watercress. The dressing gets a gourmet kick. And we do a black garlic and truffle Caesar. We don't like to overdress it. That's one of my pet peeves when you have one of those thick Caesar dressings. Asparagus smells so good. And this will kind of just gently kind of warm the salad. Shave on a nice block of Parmigiano-Reggiano. We use an irresponsible amount of this on the salad. We like the nice, like, fluffy snow. This is the kind of irresponsibility that I can lean into. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think everybody kind of gets down with that. Next, the magic touch, those crouton breadcrumbs. Last and final piece of this is our nice soft-boiled egg. Jammy goodness. So, very simple. A little bit of a different twist on your typical Caesar salad. The universal crouton is everything. Yeah. Yeah. The crunch and texture in every bite. Caesar with a twist. I love it. You know, he's saying that everyone loves those universal croutons so much that they're just sprinkling them on everything now. They look amazing. But, you know, there's nothing worse than, like, trying to, like, stab into a crouton and it's, like, you know, it's not working. It's either too soggy or too crusty. Nope. I'm so hungry. I know. Me, too. Door dash. We'll just door dash some Caesar salads.