Dear Feastlings,
For twenty-three summers now, we’ve felt those first weeks of post-Mother’s Day and post-graduation and had a bit of an exhale, and now, for the twenty-fourth time, we’re having our early summer collective sigh. It’s a sigh of recovery from our first really busy season since 2019, and a sigh of relief, although that feeling of relief usually peters out by the end of the first week of June, as the crew wonders who’ll get sent home early and how long it will be quiet around here, and I wonder whether we’ve socked away enough during season to cover payroll until things pick up again in October.
I feel fine about it if I zoom out enough- if we could make it through those first three summers and as well through the past three, plus the intervening seventeen summers, I know we’ll be fine, but I do have a tendency not to see past the end of my nose, which mercifully is larger than the average nose.
I’m also learning each year to take a bit more control over my own destiny. The summer is sprinkled each year with more reasons to dine out or to shop for wine, and while we still haven’t reached the point where we have adequate staff and business to merit running the summer request menus of yore, we’ll at least have a handful of extra reasons to stop in this summer. Tonight, for example, we’ve managed to convince Elodie Wester of French Libation to come to town and talk about her reasonably priced and quite delicious wines, and we’ve built a wine dinner around it.
Since the dining room looks quite subdued this evening from without, the wine dinner serves to remind me that what few of us remain in town often need a little extra motivation to go out. I know my own day off was spent looking for activities only to forego every single option in favor of a nap, which, incidentally, I don’t regret for a second. But naps don’t pay the light bill, so my day today will be spent writing menus until the wine dinner is upon us (sorry, the dinner is sold out at this juncture, but it’s always worth a call to see if someone cancels last minute- we’re in Tucson, after all.)
We’ll open for Father’s Day, so there’s that menu to write, and we’ll celebrate las Hogueras de San Juan on June 25th so that we don’t stretch ourselves too thinly two weekends in a row. But there’s that menu to write as well. Bastille Day will merit another Sunday opening, and tonight’s wine dinner indicates that there’s evidently a reason to keep putting wine (and beer) dinners together throughout the summer. Ferragosto will happen again on August 15th, and we’ll keep finding reasons to offer special menus throughout.
For the uninitiated, these holidays feature menus of Spanish, French and Italian dishes, respectively, with discounts on Spanish, French and Italian wines, respectively. I’ll get those menus posted as soon as I’m able.
In the meantime, we’ll see some of you at the dinner tonight,
Trust your importer: French Libation dinner with Elodie Wester
and another number of you at this Saturday’s wine tasting.
I’ll be writing a menu for our Primavera Cooks dinner with our apprentice chefs this Friday as well, so that we can offer up something special come Wednesday, June 12th.
And there’ll be more as we continue to whip up reasons to come see us, but right now there are just bits of ideas floating in a primordial soup, eventually to come to fruition on your plate, or, more appropriately, in your bowl. Mmm- a primordial soup dinner.
I reckon it’s best to send this off and start to work on all these menus, and if you’d care to share an idea for an event that would extract you from your seclusion this summer, it’s worth a mention at the very least, even if we can’t get to them all. Whatever the case, we hope to have you visit sooner than later, and look forward to offering you some tasty food and drink.
Thanks so much, everyone.
Your friend,
Doug