Dear Feastlings,
Oh, to recover from it all. I don’t know what the pitpalls of other industries are, but my own personal bête noire is the all-or-nothing nature of the restaurant biz. I long for an industry in which the flow is steady and predictable and manageable, not one where one minute, you’re sending people home because there’s nary a guest in sight, and the next, you’re multitasking along with everyone else because, well, everyone in Tucson wants to eat before the Grammys, or the football game, or whatever else is about to happen. Or there’s two weeks of Gem and Mineral Show that finish with a bang on Valentine’s Day, all as you’ve been shorted peppadews and potatoes, napkins or Burgundies, and two people have called out sick while another has cut a thumb. With any luck, only his own.
Somehow, yet again, the kitchen crew of Feast has been nothing short of heroic. There was a mad scramble to come up with enough chicken stock to make crawfish etouffee for today, a Fat Tuesday that started off rainy and gloomy rather than celebratory, but still mercifully demanding a hearty dish like the one we made 140 servings of. There’s still room to join us tonight if you so choose, though I may be asking for us to run out of it and leave someone as cranky as I was on Valentine’s Day.
Whatever the case, we’ll keep serving it until we run out, and then we’ll get on with our week.
We’ll be making another donation run this Saturday to GAP ministries, as a number of you have continued to donate meals, and so will we. And we’ll offer up a wine tasting this Saturday with our pal Megan, a tasting with inspired wines and an uninspired name:
Then, on Wednesday the 25th, a week from tomorrow, we’ll have Cynthia’s pals in from Paso Robles with their new-to-the-state wines- the founder/winemaker of Copia Vineyards and Winery will be here with a bunch of opulent, unabashedly Paso-style wines and we’ll make food to go with them:
By then, we’ll only be days away from the March menu, another wine dinner with owner/winemaker Mark Vlossak of St. Innocent in Willamette Valley (the wines arrived today so I should have a menu for you soon,) and the end-of-month tasting with the wines of importer Gonzalez Byass.
More soon, but meanwhile, it’s your moment to order crawdads, mudbugs, yabbies, crayfish or whatever you prefer to call them. See you soon.
Yours,
Doug