Cinemorphosis

Tag: seafood

  • The Fisherman’s Stew Massacre: One Man’s Descent into Bibless Madness

    The Fisherman’s Stew Massacre: One Man’s Descent into Bibless Madness

    I still feel the stink of embarrassment from three years ago when we celebrated our twin daughters’ birthday by venturing to an upscale seafood joint—the kind of place where the prices are more bloated than the waitstaff’s sense of self-importance. As usual, I asked the waiter for his recommendation. His eyes lit up with the kind of zeal you usually reserve for cult leaders and pyramid scheme recruiters. He practically waxed poetic about the Fisherman’s Stew, describing it as if it had been lovingly ladled straight from a beautiful peasant’s cauldron of culinary magic in some idyllic coastal Italian village. Like a sucker, I bought into the fantasy, completely unaware that I’d just ordered a one-way ticket to an all-you-can-eat nightmare served with a heaping side of public humiliation.

    When the dish finally arrived, I didn’t get the warm, comforting bowl of seafood nirvana I’d envisioned. Instead, I was presented with what can only be described as a DIY surgery kit. This wasn’t silverware—they handed me actual surgical tools. A scalpel? Check. Serrated forceps? Check. Shell-crusher and lancet knife? Double check. At that moment, I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to eat the meal or perform an emergency appendectomy on a crab.

    Naturally, I asked for a bib because even gladiators need armor before going into battle. But no, they were fresh out of bibs. So there I was, defenseless and metaphorically naked, staring down a bowl that looked like it had been dredged up from the deepest, darkest corner of the ocean—probably after losing a fight with Cthulhu. The stew was a boiling pit of doom, brimming with spiky, hostile shellfish that seemed to have a stronger will to live than I did at that moment.

    What followed wasn’t so much a meal as a desperate struggle for survival. I found myself locked in mortal combat with crabs that clung to their shells like they were auditioning for a role in Jurassic Park: The Seafood Edition. I stabbed at shrimp with the precision of a neurosurgeon on his fifth Red Bull, and I tried to crush lobster claws that mocked my feeble human strength. Sweat poured down my face, mingling with brine, cioppino sauce, and random bits of squid that had escaped their doomed fate. By the end, I looked like I’d just gone twelve rounds with a giant squid—and lost every single one of them.

    The waiter, blissfully oblivious to the war zone he’d created, strolled over and had the audacity to ask how my meal was going. With my face and bald head smeared in a ghastly mix of perspiration, tomato sauce, and assorted shellfish shrapnel, I told him I’d be happy to provide feedback as soon as I finished the American Gladiators obstacle course that apparently came with my entrée. I then kindly asked him to fetch me a spare pair of pants, a T-shirt, a power drill, and some safety goggles, because clearly, I had gravely underestimated the intensity of this dining experience.

    Meanwhile, my daughter—bless her little heart—had commandeered my wife’s phone and was gleefully documenting my descent into madness. She snapped photos like some twisted paparazzo, each one capturing another level of my mental disintegration. Naturally, these shots were uploaded to Snapchat in real-time, complete with captions that probably read, “Watch Dad Lose His Dignity, One Crab Claw at a Time.”

    The whole point of taking your family out to dinner is to relax, to enjoy a pleasant evening, right? Wrong. Instead, I found myself in what felt like a cage match with an octopus that had no intention of going down without a fight. By the end of it all, I wasn’t just exhausted—I was a shell-shocked survivor of the Great Seafood Massacre of 2024, wondering how what was supposed to be a simple dinner had turned into an episode of Survivor: Shellfish Edition.

    But the true coup de grâce of the evening? My daughter proudly showed me the photos she’d posted online. In every shot, my face looked like it had been smeared with an abstract painting made entirely of sauces and cheeses. My chin had tripled, my eyes were glazed over like a stale doughnut, and I resembled nothing less than a bloated corpse that had washed ashore after a particularly rough night. The image I once held of myself as a halfway decent human being? Long gone. In its place, a digital monstrosity for all the world to see.

  • The Great 70s Oyster Feasts at Pt. Reyes

    The Great 70s Oyster Feasts at Pt. Reyes

    Every summer from 1975 to 1979, my family and a small oyster-guzzling army—ten other families and a battalion of friends—made the pilgrimage to Pt. Reyes Beach. Our sacred mission? To consume shellfish on a biblical scale.

    Johnson’s Oyster Farm supplied us with what felt like truckloads of oysters—so many that if the ocean had suddenly run dry, we wouldn’t have batted an eye. From noon to sunset, we devoured an obscene amount of barbecued oysters, each one bathed in garlic butter and an irresponsible amount of Tabasco. Thousands of loaves of garlic bread disappeared as though vaporized by our gluttony. The meal concluded with slices of chocolate cake so enormous they could have doubled as structural support beams.

    We punctuated this orgy of excess with reckless ocean dives, dismissing dire warnings of great white shark sightings because, in our teenage arrogance, we assumed the sharks would respect our dominance. Emerging from the waves, our pecs glistening with rivulets of saltwater like bronzed demigods, we returned to the picnic tables to resume our assault on the oyster supply.

    By the summer of ‘78, I had evolved into full teenage hedonist mode. That year, rather than going home with my parents, I hitchhiked in the back of a truck with a bunch of people I’d just met—because, clearly, nothing bad ever happened to sweaty, sunburned teenagers full of shellfish riding in the open bed of a moving vehicle. We were feral, fearless, and slightly delirious from a day of unchecked indulgence.

    Stuffed to the gills and feeling like King Neptune in a food coma, we stared at the stars with the vacant, glazed expressions of reptiles digesting a large meal. We swapped wild stories, unconcerned with documenting a single moment. No selfies. No calorie counting. No checking the time. Just a glorious, unrecorded blur of feasting, friendship, and youthful delusion.

    Those were happy days indeed—a time before food guilt, before social media, before adulthood ruined everything. And like all golden eras, it is gone forever.