May the 4th. Be with us.

And so we have been told that we can open for business again. Out of an abundance of caution, we decided to limit our first week to just Fuego, with areas demarcated for tables, walkways taped to the floors and capacity limited to one seating only. I think this is the time for us to be civic minded and think of people before we think of money. I would honestly have expected the MCO to last until the active cases had dropped under 1,000 and daily new cases under 50 for at least a week. I guess it was becoming too expensive for everyone. So I guess the responsibility to prevent a second outbreak falls to the people. Us.

The staff are very excited to be able to open and work again, especially on May the Fourth, so they came up with the silly line in the header. The atmosphere was wonderful, all the guests cautiously friendly, the staff smiling behind their N95 masks and then the evening took on a very biblical dimension. A double rainbow turned up like a slice of hope after the deluge.

My old friend Jin texted me this morning saying Unicorns may have been celebrating the end of MCO, but then quite quickly suggested we should grill the unicorns and serve them with a glittery mustard sauce. He’s that kind of a guy. Of course he is right; mustard sauce is excellent with horse meat and a unicorn is obviously a horse. I can’t see it having been half as successful as a mythical animal had it been a pig.

Now horse is a perfectly normal thing to eat in Luxembourg and France and most of Europe. Maybe that’s the real reason for Brexit? I have to admit that the Boucherie Chevalines that populated every village in my youthful days are becoming a rarity. Isn’t it strange that we can eat cute piglets and soulful-eyed cows and wooly sheep, but shudder at the thought of biting into a horse steak. Born out of necessity, the cheap alternative to beef had become a pricey specialty when my grandmother used to take us to a small pub that served it with a rich mustard sauce spiked by handfuls of garlic. It was always a delicious lunch, even though you’d stink of garlic for days afterwards.

This story was supposed to be all about happy rainbows and signals of hope and see what you’ve done, Jin!! But honestly, there’s only that much you can say about rainbows. Pot of gold at the end, somewhere over and then as Seiichi our jazz musician friend that we were having dinner with pointed out, there is Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Double Rainbow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHuDeEa9s7M which I shall leave you with for this morning. And before you ask, NO, we don’t serve horse meat at Fuego!

For those of you who are interested in the moral history of horse meat, check this out:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/horse-meat/529665/