Ever since the young age at which I started eating solid foods at pool-side barbecues I’ve had a visceral hatred for all mayonnaise based salads. I’ve always assumed I wouldn’t be able to stand the taste of chicken salad, tuna salad, egg salad, pasta salad, potato salad, and coleslaw. I always wondered why you’d want ruin the delicious aftertaste of a freshly grilled hamburger with like 40 pounds of mayonnaise.

However, this past Monday, as I was standing at Cafe Duke waiting for my usual panini to finish up on their industrial strength George Foreman grill, I took a gander at the sandwich fillings, and the egg salad really caught my eye. ‘That stuff actually looks a little bit delicious,’ I thought to myself.

Barbarians Erin, Lexy, and Nicole all informed me that egg salad was indeed delicious. Ryan McManus was the sole dissenting opinion. Given the overwhelming majority in favor, I decided it was time to give egg salad a chance in my life.

Armed with Erin’s advice on what other sandwich toppings and breads went well with egg salad, I returned to Cafe Duke just before lunch time this afternoon and approached the sandwich counter. Sadly, the egg salad did not look quite as appetizing today, the egg was a lot more mashed up and it looked a lot less like a bunch of slices of delicious hard-boiled egg and a lot more like a yellow goo. However! I didn’t let that minor bump in the road dissuade me. I approached the counter and ordered egg salad on wheat toast with onion.

Upon returning to the office, procuring a root beer, and sitting down in the bi-weekly Creative Meeting, I took my first bite. The verdict: Delicious Indeed! I finished the entire sandwich and my opinion persists. I do have to say that that is some heavy stuff, I definitely had to pull in the reins on my eating pace to accommodate the whole sandwich, but for a regular bread-sized sandwich, it totally filled me up. Also, egg salad is not the ideal sandwich filling, it definitely wants to get out from between those two pieces of bread. I would highly recommend a fork to salvage the escaped the egg chunks once the sandwich has been consumed. In the future, I also plan to try out additional sandwich fixin’s with the egg salad, I suspect avocado and tomato would be quite delicious when paired with it. Overall, egg salad sandwiches have definitely earned a place amongst steak burritos and chicken pad thai in my regular lunching options.