Chapter 11 – Building Rafts

Downtown Kitchen – La Estacion – 777 E. Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee

This is a big, scary cafeteria (seats 420) that is part of the US Bank Building indoor complex, and seeing how it's a place that primarily serves office worker lunch, it should be both better and worse than it is. If that makes no sense, try eating lunch there every weekday for a year. The cafeteria is dark and dingy, in an understandable effort to not feel like the fluorescent nightmare cafeterias of the past—but what it makes me think of is a post-industrial factory where droid eyeballs or iPhone home buttons are manufactured. The place actually has a staggering variety of food, and if I didn't have a gluten-free diet, I could eat something different each day of the month. As it is, though, I'm severely limited, but the La Estacion taco/nacho station is always an option. I may (or may not) discuss the tacos later, but for now I'm focusing on the nachos, as I recently ate nachos for lunch on both National Nachos Day (November 6) and International Day of the Nacho (October 21). They give you a big old tub of tortilla chips, potentially covered with pretty much everything you'd expect, including a choice of meat, and rice and beans. Way too much food, but that didn't stop me from eating it all. The pulled pork is really pretty good. I guess it would be more aesthetically pleasing to get fewer ingredients, but since it's a fixed price, regardless, cheapies like me can't resist just opting for everything, until you essentially have a pail of garbage. If you manage to eat that all at once, sitting among uninterrupted sight-lines of 400 gobbling office workers, you might feel like you're being fattened as next month's meat-source. The ideal thing is to take the nachos back to your desk and allow them to define your afternoon, which they will do very well, not to mention your evening, and depending on your individual plumbing, the next morning. It would be nice if they were in some kind of cardboard container, leaking out, I guess, but with a chance of biodegrading, but as it is, they're served in a plastic shell that is so substantial you could probably have these nachos buried with you. I cannot feel good about myself buying this plastic container. Some people do it every day of the week. I mean, this thing is so heavy-duty, you could save them for a month, screw them to the side of a wooden door, seal the edges, and you'd have yourself a very functional raft. Maybe that's the idea. Is everybody building rafts?