Great Caesar's Ghost!

True story: I know the guy who claims to have invented the practice of serving Caesar salad with grilled chicken on top of it. Yeah, that very '80s dish, which became ubiquitous at all mid-scale restaurants, and sometimes the chicken morphed into blackened redfish or strips of steak. You remember it; you know you do.
My friend ran a restaurant very close to two of San Francisco's daily newspapers way back when. The kind of place where more drinking happened than eating, but every once in a while, a reporter's got to shove some nutrients down the craw. I don't know how or why my friend developed this recipe (or if it's even true he was the original creator of it).
But that's his claim to fame, and knowing him is mine.
Fast forward to present times. My friend lives in the same county that I do, and I run into him every so often. The part of the county I live in is hokey. Cornball. Lowbrow. (He lives in a nicer neighborhood and he eats at nice restaurants.) My neighborhood has a neighborhood Chili's, and I've been known to snag a plate of nachos and a pint of beer there. Not long ago, Chili's introduced a Caesar salad topped with chili-lime shrimp. I tried it.
Ohgah. Good. Embarrassing to say, but good. Tasty... if you can stand the idea of a salad draped with animal protein, which is actually a little weird. Sorry to say, old friend. Weird. But good.
Turns out you can make this dish at home.
Just make it up; I did. (So did my friend, apparently, although he used chicken.)
The one thing you have to do is cook the croutons in the chili-lime-seasoned oil you used for sauteeing the shrimp.
Otherwise, just wing it. (But not with chicken wings.)