Before my dad passed away when I was twelve, he was a manager at my family’s restaurant and an incredible home cook. He made the best Caesar salad for dinner. Truly mouthwatering. It’s a recipe with an almost magical ability to wow people and bring them together — spicy and complex on the palate, but simple to make with ingredients you probably already have in your kitchen. It was something he was incredibly proud to make, and something that was a joy to eat.
I wrote those words in 2014, a few months after I turned that recipe into an app. Twelve years later they’re still the whole reason.
Back then, my day job meant long hours in front of screens building websites for wineries — about as far from a kitchen as you can get. I wanted to make something of my own, for myself, in tribute to my dad. That salad was always in the back of my mind, and the app platform just made sense for what I kept imagining: a truly beautiful, interactive way to learn one recipe. One recipe as an app. That’s it. Crazy, right?
I gathered a handful of talented friends to bring it to life. A two-day photo shoot with the talented Katie Newburn (opens in new tab), then design and development in App Press, a platform built by my friend Grant Glas. Twelve days later, The Best Caesar was in the App Store.
What came back from the world was more than I ever imagined. Apple featured it on the App Store homepage. It got written up on Mashable and a string of design blogs. It was eventually downloaded almost 33,000 times, from all over the world. And people actually cooked. They made the recipe — sometimes improvising ingredients with whatever they could find locally — and sent me photos of their Best Caesar from kitchens all over the planet.
My favorite photo came from a father in the Netherlands making the salad with his young daughter. It brought me straight back to my own childhood, standing next to my dad. This picture is really why the app exists. Life is about shared experiences, and somehow a screen had talked thousands of people into stepping into a kitchen and making something for people they love. Digital to real-world.
Then, quietly, the app went dark. Platforms age, COVID lockdowns took over, iOS moved on, and in 2020 The Best Caesar disappeared from people’s iPhones. But the messages never stopped. Almost every week, someone reached out — a text, an email, something on social — asking for the recipe. All these years later, people were still thinking about it. Still making it. I can’t tell you how much that warms my heart. You don’t let a family recipe go out of print. Bringing it back just made sense.
So this year I rebuilt it from the ground up — no business case, no grand plan, just a fun project, exactly like the first time. And the rebuilding turned out to be a creation story of its own. The original app only existed because a friend had built a platform that let a designer like me fake his way into the App Store. That was the small miracle of its day: the wall between wanting to make something and actually making it got a little shorter. AI knocked that wall down entirely. This time I built the app I’d always seen in my head — a real, native thing I could never have built alone — working alongside Claude the way I once worked alongside that little team of friends. What used to take a team and a year now takes a fun long weekend. For me this was never really about software — it was a way to share a part of my story, and to put art and technology in the same room, which is where I’ve always liked to stand. If you have something you’ve been carrying around for years, waiting until you were somehow qualified to build it: you can do it now. Have as much fun as I did.
Version 2.0 is everything I wished the original could have been: a short film by my friend, Eric Wolfinger (opens in new tab), a step-by-step visual mode with real page turns, a written recipe that scales properly, and a community table of Caesars from around the world — including some of those original photos from 2014. Same recipe. Same standard. Better tools.
People asked me back then how I planned to monetize a free app about one salad, and my answer hasn’t changed: not everything in the world needs to make money. Some things just need to be shared.
Make it tonight. Make it for someone you love. Download the app so you’ve always got it with you. And send in pics of your creations when you make The Best Caesar — I love seeing how people make it their own.
