Dear Feastlings,
More than one of you has been and mentioned that you haven’t heard from me lately, and you’re right. In the early days of the pandemic, there’d be weeks where I’d write daily, even more than once a day, and I frankly had the time to do it, alongside the spiritual and psychological need to do it. It didn’t matter that I’d get emails back telling me to quit complaining; that only fueled the fire and I shed layers of stress like onion peels as I removed the occasional tone-deaf, privileged jerk from the email list.
Things are different now- we’re in a bit of a short-handed scramble while we try to get holiday parties out the back door and let more into the front, and until the next wave of Coronavirus comes steamrolling through Tucson, I find myself trying to do what I’ve done when we get busy: everything. I’m bussing tables, writing the January menu as well as the New Year’s Eve menus (almost there, my friends; I’ll post it soon,) organizing what speakers I can round up for tomorrow’s wine tasting,
coordinating the meals we’re taking to Youth on Their Own before said tasting,
and finding out why the snapper we ordered didn’t arrive today. We’re covering for members of the crew who are out taking care of ailing relatives at various edges of the country, replacing those who threw their hands up and walked out without notice, and mercifully, none of it has anything to do with Covid. We’re figuring out where we can get backup ingredients for the Christmas carryout menu
for which you still have a couple of days to put together your order. One item we were able to procure plenty of despite our concerns was goose, so if you thought you’d missed the goose deadline, we’re confident we can extend it to Sunday along with everything else.
We’re calculating whether the Last Sunday wine tasting should happen at all, it being the day after Christmas and the in-person/zoom conundrum being what it is, so if you think you’d attend, either in person or remotely, or if you’d like to see it rescheduled, please do weigh in on the subject with a reply to this email.
And we’re just running a restaurant, in between waves of a pandemic that I’m sure you would love as much as I to see become a more-or-less harmless endemic instead. I want to go back to lamenting that I’ve eaten too many sweets and drunk too much wine, to not turning down catering requests, and to have the worst part of the day be the guy who writes a crabby yelp review because it took to long for him to be seated despite the fact that he showed up at 7 on a Friday without a reservation.
Whatever the case, if you’re as busy as I am and reading this email as a breather between the 80 items on your to-do list, let it serve as a reminder that we’re happy to make you your Christmas victuals and tick one more item off your list, but you’ll need to order your food by the end of the day this Sunday, the 19th. And if you’re not as busy? Good for you. Good for you, I say. Put your feet up, and when you come in, don’t tell me how nice it was.
And busy or not, have a really lovely afternoon, and we’ll see you soon.
Love,
Doug