Dear Feastlings,
One of my favorite parts of my job is pairing food and wine. I understand people who “like what they like,” and I don’t fault them for it. And truthfully, there are Cabernets that could handily be poured alongside delicate white fish, and there are Chardonnays that could easily stand up to a steak. It’s a question of finding the wine that works best, or, if you’re me, building the dish around the wine. All of our wine dinners and Last Sunday tastings are built on the premise that wine affects the taste of food and food affects the taste of wine. And on a rough day, where I deal with a difficult guest or an employee who’s gone AWOL, or a produce order that comes in completely wrong, one of the things that’s sure to bring me pleasure in my job is to taste a really well-executed wine and then put my own best foot forward with a dish that highlights something I want to highlight in the wine.
So I’m quite sad that this month, we’ll have to forego the Last Sunday tasting- truly, if there were a way we could pull it off, I would, but we’re now so short-handed that in order to get this weekend’s catering jobs out, prep the November menu that begins next Tuesday, and just keep things running in the interim, something had to go, and the most obvious choice, despite it being the thing I’d most enjoy doing, was the Sunday tasting. Sigh.
I intend to make up for it with additional wine events, be they dinners or tastings, because I know that our Last Sunday crowd is a loyal and consistent bunch, and I feel like I’ve let you down. But it’s still a rough time for us, and we don’t want to put on a disappointing event, so I thank you for understanding and joining us for another tasting in its stead. Meanwhile, we’ll keep plugging away. I have three more interviews this week, and I’m hoping for the best. I’m starting to get tan lines where I cross my fingers.
In the meantime, we’re doing our level best- this Saturday’s wine tasting will still happen, as it doesn’t require coordinating speakers and preparing food and writing heating instructions and so on. And it’s promising. Our friend Emilie will be here with four South African wines that will lift your spirits, or at least lift mine- the tasting looks like this:
And I’m waiting for a few more promises from my purveyors in order to get pricing squared away, but once that happens, I’ll at last have a Thanksgiving menu ready for you all. For those of you who’ve only found us recently, Feast is closed on Thanksgiving itself, but we make all manner of Thanksgiving entrees and side dishes, and offer them for pickup on the day before, with heating instructions. Then everyone gets a chance to relax a little bit rather than spending the entire day in the kitchen.
And if any of you knows an experienced sauté cook, or a serious prep cook, who’d be interested in working with us here at Feast, we’re (still) looking. You know, like every other restaurant- or really every other business- in the world, I suppose. But instead of just putting my own feelers out, it can’t hurt to put another few thousand out as well. I’m lining up the crossed-finger tan lines as we speak.
Your friend,
Doug