At my last company, we had a fancy cafeteria featuring several stations of food, such as the grill, the salad line, the sandwich line, the Italian line, the Mexican line, and the Global line.  This last station served a wide variety of food daily such as tandoori chicken, soup noodles, beef stroganoff, and falafel.  Really just a miscellaneous hodge-podge of dishes.

One day, I saw that this line was serving cioppino.  I was duly impressed.  First, I love anything having to do with crab.  I did eat my fair share of blue crabs growing up in the mid-atlantic east coast.  Also, I love anything having to do with a comfort foody, stew/soup format.  In fact, I don’t think I’d ever even had cioppino before, but I’d definitely heard of it and wanted to try it.  I knew what I was having for lunch.

Like many dot-com drones (especially at this company), I constantly had this insidious feeling of being behind in my work, so I typically got my lunch “to go” in order to eat in my cubicle.  Or at least in the kitchen or a conference room near my cubicle- you know, so in case there was some dire “design emergency,” I could drop everything and race back to my desk (you can start to see why I quit in the end).  

Well, this time, I went back with a couple of friends to eat in the break room (near my cubicle).  I was very excited about my lunch.  If you don’t know what cioppino is, it’s a spicy, tomato-based seafood stew.  Basically San Francisco’s version of the French bouillabaisse.  It contains an assortment of various seafood such as shrimp, clams, mussels, and of course Dungeness crab.  You’re supposed to eat it with a good chunk of warm, crusty bread.   Yum.

I sat down, opened my takeout box, took in the steamy aroma that emanated, and started digging in.  I pried a mussel from its shell and nibbled.  Yum.  Then I decided I had to try a piece of crab.  But I realized I needed two hands for this.  This was knife-and-fork action to extract the meat from the shell.  And then I realized that ALL of the seafood was still in its shells.  Hmm. 

I’m the kind of person who likes to have a single bowl full of food and just CHOW.  I’m not a fan of eating…  Then stopping and extracting food.  Then eating.  Then stopping and extracting food.  Pick up knife.  Put down knife.  Pick up knife. Put down knife… 

I decided I needed to de-shell all of the seafood and then enjoy my meal without interruption.  This was a little challenging because I had nowhere to discard the shells.  I grabbed a bowl from the nearby kitchen to serve as my discard pile.  Then I went to work on the seafood, still starving, and also feeling slightly bad about grossing my co-workers out with the fishy carnage.

Now this cioppino was CHOCK full of seafood, which of course is great.  But by the time I was done with my surgery and ready to dig into my meal, my colleagues were patting themselves full, and my stew was cold.  Sigh.

As much as I was excited about eating cioppino, I just don’t think it’s a great dish to serve at work.  It’s messy, it’s a lot of work (what if there had been a design emergency!), plus it breaks the rule of fish in the workplace.  I would have enjoyed this dish much more with friends in a leisurely dinner setting.  OR if the seafood had been shelled before serving.  In fact, I just realized that it’s probably safe to say that bad first date food is bad workplace food.  A girl just wants to CHOW.