Dear Feastlings,
I’ve already been feeling a bit despondent for the past couple of days. Our visit to the Primavera Men’s Shelter made me feel good about helping but deeply saddened at the plight these people face each day. It was nice to get a couple of phone calls and emails from them, though, telling us that our food had a great reception, and that what we provided actually fed more people than we expected it to, in spite of people coming back for seconds. That was good news.
I’m not one inclined to see the silver lining, though, as a general rule, and today I watched the dry but informative back-and-forth of a hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee on the restaurant industry and what might be done to salvage an industry that employs 11 million people and affects tens of millions more. Those numbers are so large and round that I can’t really conceive what that means, but I can tell you this: as congresspeople from both sides of the aisle spent one to two of their allotted five minutes pointing fingers at one another in lieu of getting more testimony from the people affected by the pandemic, I got frustrated thinking about the four dozen people here who’ve become some of the dearest people in my life over the past nineteen years, and started skipping around and hoping it might sound as if there’d be resolution that could be reached before 60-85% of the half a million restaurants in this country went belly-up. spoiler alert: it didn’t. You can watch it here yourself if it’s of interest to you, but as that guy who sees the clouds more so than the lining, it made me want to crawl back into my figurative bunker and continue my self-imposed isolation. I don’t say this to ask for sympathy; I say it more as backstory to the observation we’ve made here at Feast that when we send an email, we have a busier day than when we don’t. And my past two dejected days have meant that instead of being pandemic-slow, we’ve been ultra-pandemic-slow, so I’m warning you now: you have a delete button and you may need to use it, but if I don’t keep relentlessly sending you reasons to pick up a little something, we and scores of other Tucson restaurants won’t be around once you’ve been vaccinated and you want to celebrate that promotion, or anniversary, or the visit of your friends or family.
I’ll do make it worth your while- we’re still baking, we’re still doing remote wine tastings, we’re still changing the menu each month, and we’re still looking for other reasons to convince you to pick up food, and, with any luck, sooner than later, to join us in extremely limited numbers here at the restaurant. Until that day comes, however, I offer you two wine tastings from which to choose this weekend- tomorrow’s “take me to your liter” tasting of wines in a one-liter format rather than the traditional 750ml:
and Sunday’s tasting with Lucia Ramos Perez of CVNE, a long overdue tasting, with food pairings, of wines we were already prepping for when restaurants, bars, gyms and salons were shut down for the safety of the greater Tucson area. We never got to serve you what we were planning on, so this weekend you can get the updated and more affordable version of the dinner we’d planned:
And by all means, please do stop in and grab something from our regular menu; we’re lonely and bored, and we’re willing to bet that a number of you are as well. Here’s the menu, and the phone number, in case you don’t have us on speed dial, is 326-9363. Thanks for lifting our spirits.
Love,
Doug