It’s been just over a month since my last visit to SoCal, so I made an extended weekend trip over to Long Beach again to visit the Tempo staff. The beginning of every month is usually straining from a work perspective because of end-of-month finance tasks I have to wrap up from the previous month, so making a visit to SoCal is a nice change in scenery for a bit while I recover from the Tetris effect, except with rows, columns, and cells instead of Tetris pieces.
Our group activity of the trip was a team lunch at The Crab Pot Restaurant & Bar.
Because of the pandemic, we were only able to dine in with outdoor seating, and our party of 7 had to split into two separate groups.
The cold in Long Beach is a special kind of cold. I grew up in the Chicagoland suburbs where it just randomly blizzards throughout the winter, but I guess I never got used to the cold. It does also get cold in Las Vegas—it can drop below freezing temperatures overnight during the winter. But, the cold in Long Beach, even though it’s technically numerically 10+ degrees warmer than Las Vegas right now, feels much colder because of the ocean wind.
While we were waiting for some tables to open up, we were seated at a “bar area.” The bar was still a table, but I imagine it’s some technicality that allows them to remain operational during the pandemic if they split up their tables by classification. The “bar” table wasn’t that cold; we got a few appetizers, including some oysters.
After our actual meal table was ready, we were relocated closer to the oceanfront, where I proceeded to begin freezing to death. The restaurant had some heat lamps, so I asked for the one near our table to be turned on, and I sat myself down directly under it. I know for a fact that it helped a lot, because the person sitting to my left had a little container of liquified butter, and her butter literally started forming ice on the top because of how cold it was.
After our meal, our friend saw a different party getting some dessert, and she wanted some as well, so she ordered a mud pie for us. We found out that mud pie wasn’t cake, but rather, a massive glob of excessively sweet ice cream covered in chocolate syrup and whipped cream. We got through a decent chunk of it together, but we eventually couldn’t handle the sweetness and passed it on to the other table that had the other half of our party.
This was a fairly quick trip just to visit staff; I’ll be headed back to Long Beach again not too long from now for a more long-term stay. Before my flight back home, I stopped by a French bakery to get some macarons for my roommate. It had a nice, warm aura to it, so I snapped a photo.
