Dear Feastlings,
Summer in Tucson for a seasonal business requires a certain amount of tightrope walking. The people who winter here are summering where it’s far more comfortable, and the people who don’t have a summer place to live will at least try and get out of town for a week or two, and when they come back, they dine out perhaps a bit less than they normally would, as they’ve been living an artificially luxe life when they went to a beach, or a big city, or a mountaintop somewhere that isn’t holding a steady hundred-and-five-degree temperature.
Our strategy in the past was to take requests- for years, the summer months were dedicated to bringing back for a week at a time the dishes you wanted us to make, but the pandemic and its ripples have put rather a crimp in that tactic: our staff of hold had been with us for between ten and twenty years at a stretch, and they knew all the dishes of our past inside out. Now, not so. In years past we could estimate how many of each given dish we’d sell and order accordingly, but there’s no longer a yardstick of normalcy- we’ll be crazy busy one night and empty the next. And even though supply lines are better than they were during the worst of it, the culture of work is a new one now, where a truck driver might not show up- I had a guest tell me that drivers in her industry would decide they didn’t want to work anymore, pull over and abandon a truck, full of supplies, on the side of the road. So while things might be improving from their worst, we still can’t count on everything we order coming in every time we order it.
We’re forced to rely on creating reasons to go out, and while that works, it often works TOO well. Opening for Bastille Day was, in the end, a sound decision. At lunch, we literally served more meals that we currently have dinner reservations this entire week. And at dinner we served almost exactly twice as many. It was great, but it comes at the expense of a nice, even week. Serving 180 people means you’ll run out of things- in our case, haricots verts, chocolate sauce and sole- and you’ll disappoint. Mercifully, most of our guests were people like you, who know us and have, at least through my relentless emails, peeked behind the curtain to discover that we’re treading water as best we can, we mean no harm, and we’re human at best. And while that’s all well and good, giving you all a reason to come in on a Sunday gives you less reason to come in Tuesday through Saturday, so did we do you and ourselves a disservice? I’ll hope not; it was still something a bit different, and people did, for the most part, appear to enjoy themselves.
So: here’s a thank you to those of you who joined us, not only for coming and supporting us, but for your patience with our shortcomings as well. And for those of you with impatience for crowds? This is the week to come visit.
The tightrope I mentioned is one stretched between our ability to handle a day like Bastille Day and our ability to withstand the nights before and after it being so slow we expect to see tumbleweeds blowing through the dining room. We’ll be testing ourselves all over again next month, on August 15th, when we celebrate Ferragosto. That menu is forthcoming, but in the meantime, we’ll have wine tastings to amuse you, this Saturday the 20th, with grill-friendly reds and whites,
and next Saturday, the 27th, with Italian wines and accompanying food pairings, whose menu is also forthcoming.
We also continue to offer our summer deals on wine.
And we’ll find other reasons to coax you out as well, so keep your eyes peeled for more emails explaining what we’re up to. Come join us and let’s see what we run out of.
Love,
Doug