Dear Feastlings,
I’m foregoing the therapeutic email today. I want to talk about how I’ve made the slow drift from Young Turk to Old Guard over the past 39 years that I’ve been working in restaurants, almost imperceptibly to me, but I’m a bit self-aware today to talk about the conversations that brought me to this point, so I’ll tuck it away for now and say this: the restaurant and hospitality industry will age you. I know that every industry will leave its mark, and I really have no other reference point, but I can’t find the spot between learning how to properly mop a floor at Lorenzo’s in University Square and shaking my head at a generation that I realize I’m going to have to learn to understand if I’m going to keep running a restaurant, as I watch the people of my generation disappear from the industry like stars absorbed into the sky at sunrise.
I’m lucky to work with the motivated people who work here, younger and older both, but just like I felt misunderstood by various bosses and managers almost 40 years ago, I clearly have some research to do if I’m going to keep working with twenty-somethings, or even thirty-somethings, because they’re not only not like me, they’re not like me when I was twenty-something or thirty-something. We’ll see whether I can figure it out.
There’ll always be guests who I don’t understand- the people who’ve never worked in the industry who’ll make me endure a lecture over why it’s wrong to have unisex restrooms, or that the only correct way to serve lamb of any kind is with mint jelly, but it’s a wide swath of America that hasn’t worked in hospitality, and there always will be, and I’m used to them. I just fret about not being able to relate to the people whose lives look like mine.
While I’m working on that, I’ll also work on the usual stuff: the current menu.
https://www.eatatfeast.com/dining/menus/lunch-dinner/
upcoming events like the other half of our donation run to the people who use the services at Sister Jose Women’s Center,
this Saturday’s Zoom wine tasting,
and this Sunday’s special menu for Ferragosto.
Now. It’s time for me to look at Tik Tok or something. I don’t know. I have no idea what they do.
Love,
A rickety old restaurant guy