Phil’s Fish Story (and the Creation of Monterey Bay Cioppino)

Crowds from a rodeo and a motorcycle rally taking place in nearby Salinas mix with local sightseers fresh from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. DiGirolamo expected to feed 3,500 customers on the day that I arrived. The place is loud, owing in part to the polished concrete floor, intended for high traffic and easy cleanup. “It’s not for everybody,” DiGirolamo explains. “I play to families.”

DiGirolamo is a stout man with a salt-and-pepper beard and warm eyes. He grew up along this stretch of coast, one of 13 kids who pitched in at the family seafood restaurant. “We wanted to be managers, but my uncles had those jobs.” Instead, DiGirolamo stuck to the kitchen, where he learned his grandmother’s cooking secrets, measuring her handfuls of ingredients so he could re-create the recipes.

The most popular item on the menu is cioppino, which DiGirolamo claims gets its name from everyone “chipping in” to the pot depending on what came in from the sea that day. His version contains an astonishing amount of seafood—scallops, prawns, calamari, mussels, fish, clams, and a cluster of Dungeness crab legs poking out of the top. Servers deliver gadgets for cracking shells and prying meat along with cheap plastic bibs that, while not stylish, do keep your clothes safe from stains.

Some years back, DiGirolamo began giving cioppino cooking demonstrations. He recalls, “One day, a guy comes in, looks at the cioppino in the electric wok, and says, ‘I want that.’ He gave me a $100 bill, I gave him the cioppino and the wok. . . and then I went out and bought five more woks.”