How can anyone take much more, and yet those of us still scrambling and treading and trying, well, we do take on more, each and every day.
My town of Tucson keeps seeing business fall and fail. Giants tumble while new efforts pop up asking for a chance. This numbers game between the virus and the small business is stacked against the little man. Before the pandemic surviving was hard enough.
For myself, building something with staying power and able to survive for years was a nearly impossible goal. We kept scraping and clawing and setting the line farther down the field in the hopes that there would one day be a time of grace. A time that had some inherent duration and hopefully provide a bit of safety and calm, so that a breath could catch. A calm could possibly settle in our home and within our efforts and that calm could permeate our community with the comfort of a place that is akin to an old friend. A place that becomes part of the fabric that makes a city feel like home. A place where the folks who have labored there are family.
I don’t know if we can survive this. I drive around my town, where I was born, where my father once had a truly great restaurant, where many of my family live, and I wonder what parts of the fabric will still be here in 6 months or a year. With these new holes, what will endure to make this town feel like one is still a part of it?
So this is not as much a food blog as it is a request, that you travel in my Food Steps and eat and taste our town as often as you can. I will visit and eat and write about places new and old that make up the fabric of our home. I will choose to visit them because they cannot fade away, because they echo our community, because they create delicious food and because they give me sense of place and time. But most importantly, because I want it in my mouth.
If nothing else, I’m always hungry.