Dear Feastlings,
I’m not sure when it happened, but lunch around here gradually ceased to be a thing. And while I grasp that the midtown lunch is rather different from, say, a Foothills lunch from a socioeconomic standpoint, or from a downtown lunch or a walking-distance-from-campus lunch from a convenience standpoint, I know that our lunch crowd used to be significantly more substantial than it is currently. I know our neighbors at Tito & Pep threw in the lunch towel after the pandemic, opting instead for a weekend brunch and dinner only Monday through Friday, so I’d like to believe that it’s not just Feast, and then we participated in Sonoran Restaurant Week, and, having offered a much more affordable, lunch-driven version of the prix fixe meal until 3 pm each day, I discovered that there are, in fact, people who go still out to lunch in midtown.
While lunch has never been particularly lucrative for us, we figured that since we were here prepping anyhow, it would make sense to offer lunch and help offset the cost of said food prep, but of late, it’s been a more quiet time of day than we’d like it to be. So, the difference being the value added by the prix fixe menu, and seeing the correlated increase in number of guests, we’re going to investigate, as good experimenters do, whether the link is one of mere correlation, or one of causality. So for the remainder of September, we’ll continue the experiment and see what sort of a change that makes in our lunch business, which has been gradually dropping off to the point at which I’m often ashamed even to open the doors.
They do this in Europe all the time- you’ll see an a la carte menu alongside a two- or three-course menu of the same dishes that adds up to less than the total would be if ordered individually, and I did some investigation and discovered that restaurants have existed in Europe for a long time- longer, even than the United States has existed.
That little lunch deal was nothing fancy- it looked like this:
Why bother with Restaurant Week when you can enjoy Restaurant Month?
Still, we saw a couple of days on which we were maybe half again as busy as usual, or possibly even more, so tomorrow we’ll go right back to it, and see whether you’re more inspired to join us than formerly.
Other than that, the only item of business is our weekly wine tasting, which this week features Old World wines that you haven’t had a hundred times before:
That’s all we’ve got in the works for the time being, but I thought it merited an email, so here it is. Thank you all for your kind support.
Doug