Dear Feastlings,
Running a restaurant has always been largely a question of guesswork. Each day of ordering is taking a stab at how many guests we’ll have and what they’ll be in the mood for.
Staffing the dining room is similarly based on conjecture. Will the people who’ve made reservations show up? Mostly, though some will arrive late and some early, some not at all, and some with two more people than will fit at the table they’ve reserved. Will they sit at the table for an hour and rush off to catch a movie, or will they stay for three hours to catch up with one another?
Budgeting is more of the same. Will tomatoes go back down to the $32 a case that they were last month, or will they remain for another week at $90 or more? This week, they’ll finally be back down to $36 a case, which is mercifully down from over $86 last week and over $100 a couple of weeks ago. Pizzerias and taco shops can breathe a collective sigh of relief. Which purveyors will add or increase a gas surcharge for delivery? All of them, so far. We have a few deliveries tomorrow whose invoices may or may not have an additional five or ten dollars a stop added on.
Restaurants are laboratories that have been running a centuries-long experiment in human nature and outside influences on otherwise predictable behavior. Rain makes a difference. Basketball games make a difference. Holidays, road construction, politics, what movies people have watched in the past thirty years- I got into restaurants because I loved food and cooking, and I stayed because I’m enthralled by cultural phenomena, from the uneaten last bite of dessert accompanied by feigned satiety at a table of four, to the snowballing of complaints that show up on Yelp- the night before there’d only been one problem with an overcooked steak and by the following morning the server was rude and the music was too loud and the dessert had no flavor.
Now comes the time of year where the theorizing and speculating shift a bit. We’ve wished good summers to our winter visitors like school chums signing yearbooks and hoping to share same homeroom in the fall, and we’re turning our attention to what reason we can provide for Tucson’s summer denizens to leave their homes. We’ll of course continue with weekly wine tastings- this Saturday features a spectrum of Pinots-
and we’ll continue to throw our holiday shindigs each month: soon we’ll be posting menus for Las Hogueras de San Juan, Bastille Day and Ferragosto, and the Tucson chapter of the American Wine Society has again graciously offered to let us open their June 10th Oregon tasting with food pairings to non-members as well, so we’ll be posting that menu soon as well.
The Primavera Foundation is rebooting its “PrimaveraCooks!” dinners, so we’ll be hosting one in August to benefit the foundation, and we’ll be offering our summer wine deals from Memorial Day to Labor Day, so it’ll be a good time to restock your cellar. And there’ll be more- we still head over to GAP ministries with food donations every couple of weeks, and I dare say we’ll soon be bored enough to come up with even more reasons for you to dine out, and traffic will be such that it’s quick to get here and easy to get a last-minute reservation. And I’ll be watching the daily social/economic/meteorologic experiment that is the food service industry.
See you soon, I hope.
Love,
Doug