Dear Feastlings,
Each summer, Feast sits quietly on Speedway with a handful of you drifting in and out throughout the day. The majority of Tucson’s populace finds cooler climes, and the majority of our produce falls victim to the heat. Ordering ingredients for a restaurant is already a combination of skill and art, prognostication, guesswork and luck. In the winter months, you order what you expect to sell and hope you sell it. In the summer, though, in Tucson, new caveats rear their heads. First, it’s slow, so you have to be quite careful not to overorder- the heat shortens the shelf life of everything, and fewer guests means a slower turnover of product. But there’s more in the summer- delicate items won’t make it through more than a day or two, and being harvested and traveling through the heat, they often arrive at the distributor only to be rejected for quality issues, or if they make it past that milestone it can be another day or two before they get to our door, only to be rejected here because what was acceptable two days ago at the distributor’s back door no longer qualifies by the time it gets to ours.
So the ideal method, since we can’t be assured that the quality will meet our standards or yours, is to order the item from more than one company and hope that one of them sends something acceptable. With a menu like ours, though, the items are special order only, which means that *if* they show up, and *if* they’re of acceptable quality, we’re entirely in danger of receiving more product than we can sell through. If one purveyor shorts us our squash blossoms, we hope that another will have sent us something we can use. Just as often, though, we receive them from two purveyors. Or from none. This past week, we got enough squash blossoms. Today there were none. We were promised 100 from one purveyor, but we discovered that the restaurant to whom our sales rep *intended* to promise them was another place altogether. Another purveyor can’t get them for us until Saturday, so we’re on pins and needles wondering whether tomorrow will bring us blossoms from the first one (“I’ll try to get them for you tomorrow, but it may not be until Thursday.” This, mind you, from the one who accidentally promised us another restaurant’s blossoms.) Same with yellow wax beans. Items that used to be in season in the summer were in season when it was 95 degrees outside, but 107 degrees is another story.
Every day is a tightrope walk- we order more than we need in hopes that enough will arrive, but if everything we ordered comes in, we’re in trouble. What’s more, we have to order more items than we need, because while we spread our risk around by ordering from multiple purveyors, each one has a minimum that’s required in order to make the truck. If not, there’s a surcharge. So if you’re curious as to why restaurant prices keep rising, this is one of the many reasons. There’s labor, sure, and overhead, but there’s also the delicate balance of ordering, and who’s bringing in ingredients for you, and what they bring, and how reliably they bring it.
I’m hoping squash blossoms will arrive Thursday, if not tomorrow, and that wax beans will arrive by Saturday. Slightly more dependable, as it’s been harvested long ago and has been converted to a more stable state, is wine. The last Saturday of the month is upon us, and as such, the wines for this Saturday’s tasting have arrived safely, and we’ll be offering them up on the 26th at 2:00 pm, with food pairings alongside. You can find out about the tasting here:
and in short order, you’ll find the menu to which this Saturday’s tasting is a prelude- Ferragosto is Friday, August 15th, and we’ll be celebrating by offering Italian dishes and discounts on Italian wines. What’s more, since it doesn’t fall on a Monday like Bastille Day did, we’ll be offering it all for lunch as well as for dinner. Keep your eyes peeled for the forthcoming menu. With any luck, all the ingredients will arrive for it.
Your pal,
Doug