Dear Feastlings,
I’m relentlessly mocked by my coworkers for a host of reasons, but the lowest-hanging fruit is arguably my goodbye. Maybe it’s because the first eight or ten years that Feast was open, I closed the restaurant every night; maybe it’s because my distractible nature makes me vulnerable to it; and maybe it’s that my equally distractible cohorts invariably remember they needed to talk about something as soon as they see me edging toward the door; but whatever the reason, my first goodbye to the rest of the staff is invariably about a half-hour warning that I’m eventually going to be leaving.
So it is as well with up and coming events- I (we) plan and plan and plan, and something usually comes up to alter those plans. A host of figurative fires to put out, as well as reliance on other people to fit within our critical path, often mean we start out talking about what we’re doing and then everyone is forced to hurry up and wait. So I’m talking about what’s eventually going to transpire now, in hopes that a month from now it will have come to fruition.
First, we’re interviewing people. At long last, with Covid-related unemployment benefits drawing to a close, restaurant workers are throwing open the hatches to their bunkers, cracking their knuckles and peeking out to survey the damage wrought by the apocalypse. And we’re interviewing them at long last. Two months ago, we’d place an ad and there’d be literally no response whatsoever, but now there are cautious nibbles at our line. So while lunch service isn’t necessarily what I’d call “within reach,” the groundwork is finally being laid.
Next, I’m talking with people. Our next delivery run will happen on June 25th, and will take me on a lap around Tucson, with stops on the east, west, and south sides of town, distributing meals to people living not only under the weight of poverty, but under that of severe mental illness as well. It’s a one-two punch that makes for poor eating as a general rule, so we’re headed their way with something nutritious that will, with any luck, also put smiles on some hundred and fifteen faces. But again, I’m waiting for more information from the kind people at Compass Affordable Housing, who administrate and aid this Herculean project. So like my first goodbye of the evening, it’s only a harbinger of things to come, and you’ll get more news about it over the coming weeks. But as always, for every eighty meals the community donates, we’ll be donating twenty more as a thank you to the community at large.
In the more immediate future, we’ve got a wine tasting tomorrow- or technically, a tasting of aperitifs, a digestif and a cordial,
and not far behind the tasting, some specials for Father’s Day
and more specials for the Bonfires of San Juan.
And with any luck, the hellos I’ve just mentioned won’t take as long to execute as my nightly goodbyes. That music from the Ink Spots was fun the other day, so in the interest of putting people in a good mood, I’ll don my epaulets and leave you with another catchy tune:
We’ll see you tomorrow at the tasting, I hope.
Love,
Doug