Dear Feastlings,
I thought quite a bit about what to write today, being grateful that I had already promised to hold off on the emails for a couple of days, just as pandemonium was breaking loose. Again.
As a guy who, 19 years ago, just wanted to open a little restaurant, make food that was tasty and offer wines i felt were delicious, I never thought I’d find myself feeling the need to comment on whether the death penalty with no judge or jury was appropriate for possibly having passed a bad $20 bill, or selling loose cigarettes, or jogging, or having your front door kicked in at 1:00 AM while you slept. But I found myself wondering for the past two days whether I’d be taken to task for NOT commenting, and of course whether I’d be taken to task for commenting. I wondered whether I’d be called out for questioning whether anger and uprising are appropriate right now, or called out for saying that maybe the appropriate way to channel that anger doesn’t include smashing all the front windows of Senae Thai Bistro, or Caffe Milano, or a dozen other small businesses in Tucson alone. So I’m commenting, and if you think I’ve climbed too high on a soapbox, you have a delete button or you can ask me to remove you from the email list. I’m not here to get on my high horse, so much as I’m trying to navigate the minefield of what’s appropriate to say and do ( or not say and not do) right now. So here’s what I’ll say: do black lives matter? Um, yes. Yes, they do. Does that preclude other lives from mattering? Nope. It just means it would be nice to go for a jog and not wonder whether you’ll return, regardless what you look like. And as for the concerns that have arisen due to people finally being fed up enough to make their voices heard, i’ll also go on the record as saying that no, Dee at Senae Thai did nothing to deserve having all her windows smashed, regardless how angry and fed up any or all of us may be.
As for me, I’ve given up longing for the days when my biggest worry was that yellow wax beans didn’t come in despite our produce guy having promised them to us for the past four days. Now, it seems, I’m watching democracy crumble around me and I find myself even longing for the days two months ago when my biggest worry was whether the business I’ve invested 19 years of my life in and the people who’ve become my second family were going to survive a deadly pandemic. Ah, the salad days.
So my plan for today is to try to hearken all the way back to the days I daren’t long for, and go back to the food and wine that we started out with. It doesn’t mean that I’m deaf and blind to what’s going on around us; it means that even though I thought I’d reached my saturation point two months ago, I’ve discovered a new, more saturated saturation point.
My politics are my own, and yours are your own, and we’re each entitled to believe what we believe, and with any luck, when the votes are tallied, more people will be happy with the result than those who aren’t. And if we’re supremely lucky, someone will still hear even those unhappy souls and strike a compromise. But in the meanwhile, at Feast we’re going to just keep making food and offering drink, and keep doing kindnesses where we can, and hope for the best.
Today begins the June menu, which, in the interest of including various menu requests from the get-go, includes bouillabaisse, and that King salmon with the relish of pickled grapes, lemon zest and cashews, and the black and bleu sandwich, among other things. You can find the menu here.
and you can call in an order at 326-9363. You can also start planning whether you’ll attend this week’s zoom wine tasting, which takes place on Saturday, June 6, at 2:00 PM, and know that on Thursday, Friday or Saturday, you can pick up samples of the wines, or have them delivered. Here’s that tasting.
Maybe I won’t spit a drop at this tasting.
Love,
Someone who’d rather worry about whether his head is misshapen or that the yellow wax beans that didn’t come in