When my (ex)boyfriend, a bonafide east coast seafood fanatic heard that Frontier Chicago was hosting an AYCE crawfish boil he was immediately "in." He got so giddy with excitement that I couldn't help but say yes even though I know that I'm not the fastest with de-shelling the sea roaches.

After years of practicing, I still don't understand how some people can twist, pop, pop and wind up with a fully in-tact little nugget of meat!

So we headed up to the restaurant, settled into our seats and the food started rolling in. Seasoned heavily with a ton of roasted garlic, the crust on these guys was fantastic. I know this because it was soaked into the corn. A much easier way to get the flavor without the work.

But my (ex)boyfriend tucked in and started going to town. For every 1 I did, he did about 10. Pretty sad ratio for me. I was more into chatting up our neighbors who were all also seafood fans but didn't super get the appeal of the crawfish work. One of them even ordered up a shrimp po-boy because she just gave up on getting down & dirty.

He wanted to see how much he could handle. He'd never done an AYCE before, knew his capacity and love for seafood ran deep, and really wanted to see what kind of damage he could really do. Turns out, about 9 pounds of crustacean carnage! That's a lot of shellfish - lemme tell you.