Dear Feastlings,
With Father’s Day only a day away, it seems appropriate to me to send an email with the most Dad Subject Line I can think of: “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.”
I know I’ve already sent out an email this week, one that will likely be interpreted by a great many of you as a Venn diagram of complaint and self-pity, as my emails often are. Today, though, I send out a brief email rather as a preemptive strike. After receiving a two-out-of-ten sentiment rating on Resy from a guest this Thursday who had the misfortune of arriving for lunch before the truck arrived with our squash blossoms (there’s that self-pity,) I was met a few hours later with a text from my seafood rep, which said, “I have very bad news. Our lobster shipment was delayed. Lobsters will not be arriving until the 22nd. I am completely out of live lobsters until then (and that would of course be the complaint.)” On the heels of that one was the shortage of squash blossoms we’d been told by a produce rep were such a sure thing that we shouldn’t even consider a back-up plan order from a different purveyor. In the end, we were disappointed by them both, which I’ll assume means you’ll be disappointed in us if you’re slated to join us before Tuesday, and likely even if you arrive before Tuesday evening, the way things have been going.
I read an article saying that it was a good twelve years before the onset of the Spanish Flu before things got to really be normal again, and I’d note that as much as the supply chain issues have improved since Saint Patrick’s Day of 2020, I’d say another six years until normalcy is likely a good guess.
The upshot is this: If you thought you’d be snacking on squash blossoms today or tomorrow, or that your Lobster Thermidor tomorrow would be half of a petit live lobster, I’m here to disappoint you like a ne’er-do-well child disappoints a father. Let’s just try not to veer into mad territory. Will there be lobster tomorrow? Yes. Yes, there will. Will it have recently been live? No. No, it will not. In hopes of atoning to your satisfaction, though, we’ve procured some rather large frozen lobster tails. These tails have gotten the double eyebrow raise from the staff- they’re 10-12s, which in seafood wholesaler parlance means that ten to twelve tails is what it takes to fill a ten-pound case. They’re substantial.
So we look forward to your joining us, be it today, tomorrow, or thereafter, but we hope that instead of being mad, or even disappointed, you’ll do that Courtship-of-Eddie’s-Father style of parenting where we walk around in Technicolor holding hands while Harry Nilsson sings lovingly over our sweet montage. Happy Father’s Day, everyone.
Love,
Doug