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He'd tantalize us each morning with an email outlining his plans for ravishing our taste buds, an email that included a different menu every day, like this one:

Soups: Cream of Asparagus, Savory Mushroom & Lentil

Salads: Thai Noodle, Old-Fashioned Potato Salad, Carrot Dill, Organic Mixed Greens

Entrees: Roasted Turkey Breast with Miso Turkey Gravy and Cornbread Stuffing, Braised Tofu & Eggplant over Brown Rice*

Sides: Candied Yams, Green Beans

Desserts: Apple Pie, Blueberry Tarts, Cherry Pie, Creamy Rice Pudding

Once marketing moved downstairs to the cubicles adjacent to the café, I could see the lunch line begin to form shortly before noon. I always dropped whatever I was doing to be near the front.

"Wait for the bell!" Charlie spat at us if we pushed too far into the café before he was ready. If things weren't going well in the kitchen, it was dangerous to get too close.

"Watch out. Hot soup!" he'd yell, pushing through anyone blocking his access, giant steaming tureen held high. Charlie dashed about, paring knife in hand, madly slicing and dicing last-minute garnishes and loading the breadbaskets, his temper flaring like the gas burners under a fatty stir-fry. Only when everything was in its place would he ring the little hotel check-in bell on the counter signifying that it was safe to begin. The chain gang would shuffle past, serving itself salads and a main course before ambling toward the desserts and the drink cooler. Still, it was better to risk Charlie's wrath than to miss a favorite entrée or some special chocolate confection whipped up in limited quantities. Ops—ever optimizing performance—installed a webcam over the door for a live feed of kitchen conditions, line length, and the intensity of Charlie's agitation.

The six-foot folding tables at which we sat were straight from an office supply store and surrounded by the cheap metal chairs they bring out for overflow crowds at church services and funerals. The implicit protocol was to take the first available seat next to whatever engineer or salesperson or facilities staffer happened to be the last one seated, and then engage them in conversation. Sometimes the resulting dialogues were peppered with German or Chinese or with the equally incomprehensible acronym-laced geek-speak. I feasted on critiques of competitors' releases and detailed descriptions of the esoteric elements of GWS, accompanied by diagrams inked out on paper napkins. I asked naive questions and got sophisticated answers about our technology and our industry, a process that was part of Larry and Sergey's calculus behind offering employees free food in the first place.

Much has been written about Google's free meal plan (one estimate put the cost at seventy-two million dollars per year),* but the basics of the program were simple: lunch and dinner were free, and we could eat as much as we liked from our first day with the company until our last. Like most Googlers, I spent less than half an hour at lunch and, if on deadline, would just retreat with a plate to my desk. Without the café, I would have lost twenty minutes getting to a restaurant, half an hour eating, and another twenty minutes getting back. I would have stopped thinking about Google as soon as I cleared the front door so I could focus on consuming fatty, salt-saturated foods on my way to increased sick days and a premature death. Looked at that way, the policy made sense to me.

Charlie did have a budget, however, and given his complaints about its limitations, everyone was shocked the day he served lobster for lunch.

"Don't worry," Charlie assured the crowd, "I got a special deal because they only had one claw." No one dared ask where he had shopped for one-clawed lobsters. Perhaps they got in too deep with loan sharks. They tasted great. That was all we had to know.

Besides, Charlie made sure nothing went to waste. "In the early days, Charlie used to call me down to eat all the leftovers," engineer Chad Lester fondly recollects. "At the very beginning