Dear Feastlings,
Every time it feels like the dust has begun to settle, it gets stirred up again. Today’s email comes late in the day primarily because of supply-chain problems in conjunction with Mother’s Day and Cinco de Mayo. We’ve spent the first half of the day trying to find out whether we can get various ingredients, how much of them we can get, and whether we can trust the reluctant promises of the people tasked with getting those ingredients to us. Now we’re knee-deep in figuring out whether we can scramble and get more of anything for an unexpectedly substantial response to Cinco de Mayo. Two months ago, if this had happened, we’d have called one of our purveyors based here in Tucson, he’d have run more chicken out to us, I’d have treated him to a beer or a bite for his troubles, and we’d all have congratulated ourselves on being busier than we’d expected. Now it puts us all into a tailspin. I’m warning you right now that some of you who’ve ordered the chicken mole today may be getting breasts rather than legs, and as a guy who prefers dark meat over white, I’m aware of the disappointment that can generate in a person.
That said, I feel like in the current climate, if getting white meat instead of dark is the deepest disappointment you experience today, you’re living pretty well.
I’m trying to avoid a far more difficult food shortage come Mother’s Day by giving you the opportunity, beginning now, to order something for a mother in your life who deserves something special this Sunday. While today’s shortage is being resolved at various and sundry grocery stores by various Feast staffers, I feel far less confident that we’ll be able to run to the store to procure a sushi-grade New Zealand Ora King salmon, or for that matter, a few live Maine lobsters. So here’s the menu and the opportunity to plan ahead in hopes of no rugs being pulled out from under us, and therefore, by the transitive property, from being pulled out from under you. On Mother’s Day, of all days. Here’s the menu.
In my own personal dream world, though, we’d be free of supply line issues, we’d have an accurate idea what’s going to be ordered in this disordered world, and I’d be writing you about the thing I’d normally be writing about, namely, the May menu, which begins today’
and this week’s wine tasting, which will occur by zoom meeting this Saturday at 2:00 pm: