Dear Feastlings,
I’m not much of a sports fan, but even I know that if someone is pitching a no-hitter, you shut your mouth and don’t talk about the no-hitter. And I’m no expert on Shakespeare, but I know just as well that if you’re making a production of Macbeth, you don’t say the protagonist’s name.
So when I got cocky on Saturday and thought it would do no harm to mention my good fortune- the first day in five when no one had called out sick- I made a grave miscalculation. Within an hour of the email, the line cook who’d already been out for two days recovering from his vaccination called to say that he’d be out for a third. An hour and a half before his shift began. And today my phone started going off at 6:04 AM with more of the same. This is so not remotely over, and I have no business crowing about my luck.
Not that I’m not completely accustomed to flying by the seat of my pants. A monthly menu change fairly begs for drama and pain at least a dozen times a year. Add to it a weekly wine tasting, a monthly one, and a host of other events and donation runs, and you’re just asking for trouble. And receiving it. Often. Nonetheless, two years of this is rapidly wearing the seat from these houndstooth chef’s pants away, and here I am on the 25th, nearly twelve hours after the texts started fast and furious, and I’ve just barely gotten the tastings written up (still don’t have the food pairings and heating instructions finished, though) and a week from today is New Menu Day, for which I’m not ready either. Nor the Gem and Mineral Show for which people are already trickling into town, and into the dining room that we’re feverishly attending to with a skeleton crew. My hope is that we can pull this off like we’ve been doing for years, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Wish us luck getting the menu squared away for February, and in the meanwhile, we’ll stick with wine, for a couple of reasons: first, it’s chronologically nearer than the new menu. More on the wine tastings this weekend in a moment. But second, or actually now first, since I’m not getting to the tastings for a moment, there’s this snippet of good news. I’m acutely aware that we see what we want to see and we hear what we want to hear, but here, for the record, is something I want to see and hear:
Drinking wine could lower risk of Covid infection, study finds
And in an effort to help you reach full Covid safety, we’re offering two wines tastings this weekend, one on Saturday with some more familiar bottles
and one on Sunday with some wines you may not have tasted recently.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get next month’s menu written and probably rewrite the schedule every day for the next three or four weeks.
Love,
Doug