June has always been the start of our produce selling season. We would send the truck in Tuesday through Saturday with the first modest displays of beet greens, asparagus, broccoli raab, and mesclun, and lots of flowers and plants. The restaurant would be delighted to work with fresh vegetables again, and we would hotly debate at menu meeting whether the bakery, restaurant, or farm stand would get to have the limited supply of asparagus. The novel corona virus has upended much of what seemed normal and systematic in the past, but right on schedule we have the first crops in volume to harvest from our fields. We will be offering two produce boxes a week for pickup on Monday and Thursday evenings during our pre-order take-out dinner service . These boxes will need to be pre-ordered on the website. They will not be overloaded with food for a week, making it impossible to jam it all into your fridge. They will be scaled for a few days of consumption and not unreasonable for a single person. We will continue to offer our Saturday Care Package for pre-order which contains a mix of produce and other good things from Chase’s Daily. We will also have produce, flowers, and plants to shop for in person on Saturday mornings. Once we sort out how to do that safely and effectively we will add other good things to the mix: maybe coffee and espresso drinks, maybe a few muffins, or a breakfast sandwich to go. Maybe.
On Saturday morning my daughter Romy answered the telephone at Chase’s Daily and spoke with a customer. The customer wanted to know if we were open and Romy launched into a description of what we were offering each week. She concluded her explanation with our hopes to offer more as we sorted out how to do it safely. The customer retorted “wear a mask and stay six feet apart” and when Romy acknowledged their reply and volunteered that we were doing the best we could, the customer hung up on her. I think that many customers may not consider the safety of our staff and family when they think about Chase’s Daily reopening in earnest. So much emphasis has been placed on protocols for protecting customers in restaurants, but there is very little concern for the protection of the humans working close together in the kitchen. Until we feel safe to proceed, Chase’s Daily will not open with a full staff working close together. We will proceed in a piecemeal and confusing way dictated by density constraints in our work place. Another constraint is that we have elected not to send Cleo back to daycare at this time. We will pay to hold his spot until we feel that it’s safe to send him back. We are all sharing his care and enjoying his company, but we are all less productive as a result.
We are adapting. I hope we have your support as we chart our course through this challenging time.
With love from all of us,
Addison, Penny, Phoebe, Freddy, Meg, Romy, and Cleo
