Dear Feastlings,
As Feast approaches twenty-five years of plying its trade, I’m told all the time that it’s a tremendous achievement. With the statistics on restaurants indicating that about 90% of us fail in the first year, and of those who make it past that first year, another 70% fail in three to five years. It feels good to be in the remaining fraction of business that survive this long, but as legacies go, it’s got nothing on Saint Patrick. People are still donning their finest green garments and dyeing beers and rivers and hair green even now to celebrate his feast day, and it’s been well over fifteen hundred years since he passed away. That, my friends, is a legacy.
I’m cautious in sending this email today, as it’s already gotten around among our regular guests that we corn a serious brisket, one that’s tender and brown and has no saltpeter in it, nor nitrates, and I poke through last year’s numbers and those of the year before, and it looked as if we sold about 85 servings or so each year, so I felt confident when we tabulated our prepped corned beef at 120 servings. Then lunch happened, and we’re down to 98 servings and 98 reservations on tonight’s books. I feel confident that some of our guests will order something besides corned beef and cabbage, but given the way things have gone this month, I’m a bit skittish.
All that said, we’re now halfway through our mechanical hassles- the transformer arrived yesterday and we now have lights in the dining room again, but the coil we need for our downed refrigerator, despite its being promised to us three to four days ago, still has yet to arrive, so the pantry staff will continue to revile me for another week. I hope it’s no longer than that.
In the meantime, we’ll be doing our usual: we have a tasting of Iberian wines this Saturday, with our friend Emilie,
and we’ll be running over to GAP ministries again that selfsame morning with another hundred and fifty meals, some donated by you and some from us here at Feast. We, and they, thank you for your generosity.
After that, it’ll be Italy, Italy and more Italy- the end-of-the-month tasting will be another in our Trust Your Importer series, this time with Giuliana Imports, so you’ll taste four Italian wines and have food pairings with them (I haven’t posted it yet because I have yet to taste the wines and write the food pairings, but you’ll see it posted later this week) and then on the 14th of April, you’ll have a chance to chat with Giovanni Triscornia of Ethica, another importer of some really good Italian wines as well. That will be posted soon as well, but again, I have to write that menu yet.
Today, meanwhile, will still be something of a nail-biter: since I started writing this email two hours ago and have run around the kitchen, the dining room and the wine shop, our reservations have increased and our remaining corned beef and cabbage has shrunk a bit, but I’m hopeful we’ll have enough for everyone who wants some today. I’d hate for our legacy in 1565 years to be the memory of the night we ran out of corned beef and cabbage.
Yours,
Doug