Dear Feastlings,
Conventional recognition isn’t really my bag. There’s no trophy case in my history, and if you look in the wine shop, you’ll see framed Wine Spectator awards from about ten years ago or so, while the ones we’ve received thereafter are crammed into an envelope in the office, from whence I’ve been meaning to extract and frame them for what appears to be five years. Ribbons and trophies make me supremely uncomfortable, and I’m apt to forget birthdays and anniversaries, as they’ve felt fairly arbitrary to me since I was about eight. I pay attention to holidays, but mostly because our guests expect menus for them; I don’t usually celebrate them myself unless I’m along for the ride and someone else is steering.
I make no judgement about people who like that stuff; people absolutely deserve recognition for their achievements. I just know that I ever won an Olympic Gold Medal or a Nobel Prize, it would end up in the bottom of my sock drawer.
So while we’ve been creeping up on a fairly arbitrary 25 years of hash-slinging at Feast, I’ve prepared essentially nothing. Mary Ann has been nipping at my heels for weeks to come up with some sort of a shindig or a special or an event, and all I’ve been able to eke out is the May menu, which I’ll post next week, the menu for the wine dinner on May 7th,
https://www.eatatfeast.com/events/2026/04/quinta-do-vallado-dinner-with-greta-arendsen/
and the Mother’s Day menu,
https://www.eatatfeast.com/events/2026/04/mothers-day/
and this Saturday’s wine tasting.
https://www.eatatfeast.com/events/2026/04/expect-the-unexpected/
And for what it’s worth, come Friday, May first, Feast will have orbited the sun twenty-five times. What that means to me, far more than any achievement of our own, is that you don’t last this long without owing a debt of gratitude to your community, and that, my friends, is you. Thanks for twenty-five years of support and kindness, for tolerating our mistakes and celebrating our victories, and for breaking bread with us here for your own celebrations, be they happy or sad.
We love you and we appreciate you.
Doug and twenty-five years’ worth of the the crew of Feast