A man’s fishy reaction to his Caesar salad at a restaurant has people on the internet giving him major side-eye.
On Aug. 15, TikTok user Tiffany Watkins posted a video of her husband Rick (who declined to share his last name) sending back a Caesar salad that was decidedly not to his liking at a restaurant in the Hotel Riu Palace in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
“The salad, fish?” he says, holding an anchovy in his hand before throwing it back into his greens and looking at an off-camera server. “Oh my god, no fish, please. No, no, no fish in my salad, in the Caesar salad, no.”
He exclaims “What the—,” spits into his napkin and asks his server to remove the croutons and fish from his salad and “add egg.” (Perhaps he should have ordered a Cobb salad instead.)
“Why would they have fish in my Caesar salad, bruh?” he asks. “Motherf—ing sardines in my Caesar salad. They’re acting crazy around here, man, this s— is pissing me the f— off.”
The video went viral, with more than a million views and over 10,000 comments, with most people also pissed off — not about the salad, but about Rick’s behavior.
“People have no decorum or manners nowadays,” wrote one TikTok user.
“elbows on the table, loud, spitting in the table napkin,” wrote another.
Others pointed out that Caesar salad, by definition, contains anchovies.
“Caesar dressing is made from anchovies unc,” wrote one user.
“Wait until he hears about Worcestershire sauce!” wrote another, alluding to the fact that the sauce, which is an ingredient in Caesar dressing, also contains anchovies.
“Bruh crashing out because his Caesar salad was made correct,” wrote one more. “People need to learn what they’re eating.”
For those — like Rick — who might not know, the Caesar salad is a dish that is more than a century old.
According to the Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, on July 4, 1924, restaurateur and Italian immigrant Caesar Cardini, who owned restaurants in Tijuana, Mexico, prepared the salad, which was intended to be served as a main course.
The original dish consisted of romaine lettuce, croutons and the iconic dressing made from olive oil, egg, garlic, Parmesan cheese, lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce.
You may notice one fishy ingredient missing from the original recipe — anchovies. Although most classic Caesar salad recipes include the little fish now, the Cardini family staunchly opposed adding anchovies to the salad’s dressing, thinking that its flavor should be more subtle.
Rick obviously agrees with them.
“That’s the reason why I like Caesar salad, because of the dressing, but I never … soon as I went down to take one scoop, I just started smelling fishy,” he tells TODAY.com. “I go to a lot of different restaurants and eat, and I’m 50 years old, I never had a Caesar salad with that on it.”
“It was, like, the whole fish,” he continues. “Like a whole sardine, actually. I know it’s an anchovy, but it was about the size of a sardine, I want to say, or maybe even a mackerel.”
Rick and his wife, who later posted more video from that meal, say that they got the rest of the food they wanted and that everything else went off without a hitch, so they weren’t expecting people all over the world to weigh in with mean comments, but that they’re taking it in stride.
“I posted it before we went out for a winery, and I didn’t look back at it,” Watkins tells TODAY.com, saying that she checked the video — and its spicy comments section — twice before the next morning.
“We were just both surprised, and then we started getting calls from our friends and family,” she says. “It’s crazy how it just went viral over me simply recording this to show my daughter.”
The couple says that some folks started messaging their children, forcing them to make their profiles private.
“That’s what I’m dealing with right now,” Rick says. “It don’t really bother me, because everybody is entitled to their own opinion, but some people are going overboard with it.”
