Dear Feastlings,
I can’t say I’m bursting with American pride today. I just came back from our beleaguered erstwhile ally, Canada, last week to discover that traffic had doubled, gas is still expensive, and, as of today, it’s once again okay in the US to send a migrant to a county they’ve never been to. I don’t believe I’m quoting Emma Lazarus correctly: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, and I will put them on a plane to Equatorial Guinea or South Sudan to figure it out for themselves.”
I know it’s poor business to get political, but I hope that people even on the other end of the political spectrum from where I sit will acknowledge that this isn’t New Colossus behavior.
It’s with trepidation, therefore, that we spend today and tomorrow offering up regional American fare as means of tooting our country’s culinary horn, if not our moral horn, with a menu of American classics and the normally built-in corkage fee eliminated from your check more quickly than a detainee is turfed to Uganda.
That said, on my jaunt to Montreal and Quebec City, people seemed largely to understand that a few cold hearts in positions of power do not an evil country make, and I understand it as well. As such, we offer this menu not with jingoistic pride, but with a humble understanding that most of us are interlopers here, or descended from interlopers, anyhow, and that’s what makes America a pretty swell place. If you look at what we’re offering today and tomorrow, you’ll see influences from far-flung parts of the world, and if there’s one thing I like about a shrinking world, it’s that we get to taste more stuff.
Anyhow, the American menu we offer today and tomorrow is right here:
We’ll follow it up with our weekly wine tasting on Saturday, this one an exploration of what Greece has to offer, wine-wise,
and then the menu will change next Tuesday, the first Tuesday of the month.
We’ve also got a special dinner in the works, as we’ll have a visit from Amy McCandlish Esper, sometime assistant winemaker at the Eyrie Vineyards, on October 20th, and doggone if the wines aren’t another source of American (and Oregonian) pride.
Whatever your leanings, I hope this doesn’t stick in your craw. I just grew up on a lamp beside the golden door.
Love,
an American