Dear Feastlings,
While I know I often paint an alarming picture- yesterday, I nearly wrote in a panic to mention a saute cook left Feast a week before the notice he gave in a fit of pique, throwing us right back into the spot we were in when we had to shut our Sundays down (we were so close to being able to reopen!)- it’s that summertime lethargy as much as anything else that’s made my eyes dull and lifeless. Feast is quiet, but now it’s quiet the way summer has historically been quiet. We’re not feeling the panic and paralysis that we felt in the thick of the pandemic; we’re back to the normal, “who-wants-to-go-home-early-tonight?” way that we’ve been for the previous twenty-one summers. So oddly, it’s a gratitude day. I’m thankful for the familiar version of the sparsely populated dining room rather than the one stacked high with takeout boxes and hand sanitizer.
It makes it feel somehow doable now, like the unnerving part is behind us, and in four or five months’ time, we’ll also be abuzz like the old days, with a full dining room and tasty cocktails leaving rings on cocktail napkins that we can suddenly get again. I even have an upholsterer bringing chairs back today with sturdy new fabric and fresh little plastic feet to slide them on. We’ll be able to seat our whole dining room by fall, and our limited-seating dining room next week when we host our Primavera Cooks dinner, the first of this summer. They still have a dozen seats left as of this morning, so if you want a tasty dinner that helps the Primavera Foundation provide a host of services for people in Tucson experiencing homelessness, you can learn about it here
https://www.primavera.org/how-to-help-more/cook.html
and call our friend David Elliott over there for a reservation, at (520) 308-3104. We can’t take the reservations here, I’m afraid, but they’d be more than happy to over at the Primavera Foundation.
We’ll be prepping for that and serving it a week from today, and in the meanwhile, we’ve got a fresh new menu here
https://www.eatatfeast.com/dining/menus/lunch-dinner/
and a wine tasting on Saturday,
and menus hot on their heels for Father’s Day (yes, I know we’re still closed on Sundays, but we’ll open on the 19th to give you another choice as to where to bring the important dads in your lives,) and for the Bonfires of San Juan, the Spanish celebration of the Summer Solstice that we’ll celebrate a day early, because face it: it’s felt like summer here for weeks already, and we’ve got a thing on Friday the 24th, but by the time you come in for dinner on the 23rd, they’ll already be celebrating it in Spain anyhow. Keep your eyes peeled for those menus, which, if lethargy and tantrummy walkouts don’t further slow us, will be soon forthcoming.
And there’ll be more as the summer continues, pushed along by slow, hot winds: we’ll be taking another donation run out, I hope and believe to Covenant House, and there’ll be menus for Bastille Day and Ferragosto, plus whatever other reasons we can create for entice people to dine out when it’s this toasty out. I’ll be letting you know when I trot my gift certificates over to Arizona Public Media in a couple of weeks to help encourage people to donate, and what wine tastings are on the horizon- there’ll be one in conjunction with Slow Food Southern Arizona with Arizona producers that bears great promise, in August.
And whenever we’re slow enough that we’re sitting around here drumming our fingers on the countertops, we’ll put our heads together to create another reason to get you out of the house. We promise.
For now, though, tortellini seems like a good idea to me, or the frittata that everyone loved at the staff menu tasting yesterday, or the mix of smoked and pickled mussels that should freshen your palate before you move on to dirty barley or lobster with vanilla-popcorn cream and sea beans.
And saving on wine and spirits. It’s certainly gotten me through the past two years and change.
Mmmm. Wine.
Love,
Doug