Dear Feastlings,
I wonder now how we did it. Granted, summertime was consistently slower in days gone by than it is now- we have more people who live here throughout the summer, wishing alongside me for the monsoon to begin and feeling that wall of thick, hot air against their faces upon opening the door, even at night. But we used to change a chunk of the menu every week during the summer, making the dishes people requested, be they dishes from past menus or just ideas people had, and we did it for thirteen weeks each summer.
I don’t know that we could do that like we once did- there are a few people left here in the kitchen who remember those dishes of the distant past, but there are so many more who’ve only been with us for a year or two after the restaurant exodus that came with the pandemic.
As I try to get this email out with the July menu link,
https://www.eatatfeast.com/dining/menus/lunch-dinner/
and mention the fact that we’ll be closed on Friday, July 4th, for Independence Day but open on Monday the 14th for Bastille Day,
and throw in a link to this Saturday’s wine tasting, which is essentially a prelude to Bastille Day,
I wonder how I ever had the energy to write and print up an extra thirteen weeks’ worth of menus, upload them onto the website, make sure they were prepped correctly and that we didn’t make too much or too little of any dish; how we’d plan out all the special order items to arrive in steady succession as each new menu began. Now I just let the stifling heat stupefy me, and watch the staff and the traffic and the people shuffling up and down Speedway with a summer lethargy that seems duller to me than in years past. I hope the new menu and Bastille Day will be reason enough to get people out of the house, if only to keep from heating up their own kitchens, and that we all eat in air-conditioned calm, watching through the huge windows as clouds roll in to drop a generous monsoon into our laps.
And maybe that rain will hold down the dust, and cool us back to a temperature where it no longer seems foreign to us to do what we used to do, strong, unaware even that it was more work than usual, and happy to make something out of the ordinary.
Thank you, everyone who works at Feast, and thank you, everyone who used to work here. And thank you, everyone who keeps us gainfully employed. And thanks, eventual monsoon.
Love,
Doug