Dear Feastlings,
There are advantages to running a restaurant in a community like Tucson. In a city of millions, competition is fierce, but in a sweet little burg like Tucson, it’s more likely that we’ll regard ourselves as being on the same team. You know, a rising tide raises all ships, and all that. It’s not unusual for me to get a text from a fellow Tucson restaurateur asking if my tomatoes went up in price as much as theirs did, or to hope for some consolation from someone in their shoes about the fact that they’re down forty percent over last year at this time. We’ll ask each other if the guy who said he was the lead line cook for two years was really just a pantry cook for 6 months and then didn’t show up one day. I’m grateful to know so many of my fellow risk-takers and to be able to know people from whom I might borrow a salmon, say, or to whom I might send a dishwasher over when someone hasn’t shown up for a shift.
It’s a blessing, and it’s a blessing that, over the years of sending you emails, so many of you have learned how complex an apparently simple business is to run. The foodservice biz is first and foremost a gamble, and while there are some cynical formulas that are apt to prove successful for a time, even a business that starts out like Chuck E. Cheese can eventually end like, well, Chuck E. Cheese. It’s a gamble, and sometimes you’re in it for the short haul and sometimes the payoff is further down the road.
This week’s gamble is a sucker’s bet: we know that Father’s Day pales in comparison to Mother’s Day, but in the spirit of egalitarianism, we’ve scheduled our crew to come in and turn out a special menu in addition to the regular menu. On a Sunday. With Eggs Benedict. And we’ll be open all day long. I just looked as the reservations, and, thus far, anyhow, it looks a bit sparse, even for Father’s Day. I know people leave for the summer, and I know people take vacations in June, but I know as well that we Tucsonans are apt to wait until the eleventh hour to make a reservation, which makes it difficult for us to know how many lobsters to order, say, or how many racks of ribs to cook off.
Each day is invariably a gamble- we ordered more squash blossoms than we needed for today from two different vendors in hopes that we’d get half our order from one or the other, and received none of them, which is not much worse than having received all of them and then hoped to use every blossom before it curls up like a grilled butterfly.
So in this world where one can bet not only on sports, but on politics or television or just about anything at all, I’m sending this email in hopes of raising the odds that we see enough on Sunday that it was worth dragging in both an AM and a PM crew, and that a few extra dads will walk away grateful that they didn’t fire up a grill on a day that reached 103 degrees with not a cloud in sight. Or maybe dad doesn’t even live here but you’ve got a hankering for lobster Benedict or an Elvis waffle. Whatever the situation, I’m letting you all know that, while we’re seldom here on Sundays anymore, we’ll be here on the 21st, to honor what fathers come out, but we’re not kidding ourselves- we live in a culture that goes out for Mother’s Day and stays home for Father’s Day. Still, if you have the itch, we’ll be here for you. We’ll be offering our regular menu, plus this one:
I’ve also fixed the error on the website that mistakenly told people that the event that we’ll have on the 24th, Las Hogueras de San Juan, has already ended. Regrettably, we’ve not found a way to travel back and forth between the past, the present and the future, and so you’ll find this menu still to be available to you on Wednesday the 24th:
And I’ve posted this Saturday’s wine tasting as well:
I’ll also remind you that Happy Hour has returned, and it shares a menu sleeve with a prixe fixe lunch special that saves you a couple of bucks as well:
If you’ve read through all this fuss and still can’t find a reason to join us, not to fret. There’ll be another, end-of-the-month wine tasting next weekend, and before you know it it’ll be Bastille Day, and we’ll have a special menu and wine deals for that as well. Plus we’ve got that whole summertime wine deal that you’ve likely already read about, which will continue until Labor Day:
And with that, we quietly go back to playing games of chance, wagering on how many people will turn out on Sunday, what everyone will and won’t order, whether our produce purveyor will have the peas they’ve shorted us for the past three days, and how much longer it will feel like summer around here. We looking forward to seeing you in the meantime.
Love,
The people of Feast