Hi there, Feastlings.
Yesterday was predominantly a recovery day for us all, though it included a flurry or texts, phone calls and emails strategizing about how to make our satellite deliveries work more effectively, and we’ve figured out a few tricks. We’ve found a couple of apps to help us plot out deliveries, and we’re going to be starting off each delivery run with a central pickup location stop where we hang out with your meals on ice for a bit for those of you who feel comfortable picking up at a parking lot at a park or school or some such place. We’ll follow then with deliveries to the doors of people who have trouble getting out, or who are higher risk, or simply feel more comfortable having their food delivered to their door. You’ll be getting another (yes, yet another) email tomorrow with what details you’ll need, and with any luck, come Thursday, our friends on the Eastside and the Northeast will feel like part of our family again for a fleeting moment. Then, assuming that goes significantly better than Sunday did, we’ll do it again for our neighbors to the South and Southeast.
I’m not sure about you, but I find myself less and less feeling like this I’m in a bad science fiction movie and more and more resigned to accept a lengthy new reality, temporary as it may be. And it’s alternately hopeful and sad. Our friend Patty is making us all masks as we speak to add to our stockpile of homemade sanitizer and gloves to keep us all working as safely and cleanly as possible, but we’re pausing a moment as we watch our friends and neighbors draw their shutters closed- I watched our friend and neighbor John Martinez announce on Instagram a few minutes ago that today will be their last day until the other side of this thing, and I happened to be driving by as my friend Rocco changed his sign the other day and closed up Rocco’s Little Chicago until we’re through it. We at Feast are going to stick around for the immediate future, but every day brings a reevaluation.
Today’s email is coming to you later than emails have been because I’ve been checking to see if my insurance covers business interruption, applying for SBA disaster loans and figuring out what else we can do to brace for the financial impact of what happens when everyone has to tighten their belts and turn their attention from supporting the businesses that they love to supporting themselves and their families. The menu, as always, is posted here, if you’re feeling peckish tonight.
And the number to call to place your order is 326-9363. I had a fleeting notion to reread Albert Camus’s The Plague, but I think living it might be enough for me psychologically right now. So instead I’ll leave you with a tiny pinch of Camus that I hope will help you get through the week, or the day, or even an hour, but that’s better than nothing, n’est-ce pas?
“In the depth of winter I finally learned that there lay within me an invincible summer.” -Albert Camus
It even sounds good in English.
Love,
Doug