Dear Feastlings,
Every year, Tucson seems less and less like the unpopulated ghost town that it did each summer in years past. Twenty years ago, or even ten, the staff of the restaurants I was working at would stretch, languid, listening to the (analog) clock tick away the afternoon, only to serve a meager few tables and saunter home to turn their sorry pockets inside-out and tolerate the heat in swamp-cooled university-area rentals, only to do it again the next day. Yesterday, I alternately cursed the traffic and thanked the universe for keeping enough people here to help us limp through the summer.
While it’s most decidedly quieter here than during season, we’re still committed to our daily routine: we’re working away on the July menu, which begins on Tuesday, and we’ve put together this Saturday’s wine tasting, despite the fact that scores if not hundreds of you will pull up stakes and go find cooler climes or idyllic beaches to pass the holiday weekend. The tasting will happen with or without you, but I hope that it’s with you- the wines are delicious and the people who make them are fascinating.
We’re also keeping the wine bargains coming, all the way to Labor Day, and if you’ve forgotten what the deals look like, they look like this:
And, short-handed as we may be (yes, we’re STILL closed on Sundays for now,) we’re still working on a menu for Bastille Day, a bunch of French specials and an abolishment of corkage on French wines, so if you think you may otherwise be bored on the quatorze juillet, I’d encourage you to make a reservation here and honor the people who helped us out during the American Revolution.
Meanwhile, we’ll still keep interviewing potential new kitchen staff, despite the guy who didn’t show up yesterday, then wrote an apologetic email explaining how he’d mistakenly put it in his calendar for today, and then disappeared from this dimension this afternoon. And despite the two people who were coming to work a stage on Wednesday and Friday, neither of whom showed up despite their apparent enthusiasm during the interviews that they actually *did* show up for. Go figure. Less and less do I understand the land I live in, but I’ll celebrate its birthday nonetheless, and I’ll rally behind it nonetheless, and I’ll hope that when the dust settles, somehow everyone- on either side of the aisle- can eventually be proud of the place they live again. I’m going to go imagine Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil having a beer together and treating each other in a civilized way, and I hope you’ll do something similar. Happy birthday, America.
Love,
Doug