Sunday, April 22, 2012.
Tuna Shortage. Filet Delayed, But Not Denied.
My big achievement today was hanging mini-blinds over the west-facing window in my office at home. At this time of year, the sun shines right in my face in late afternoon while I'm sitting there doing the show. Now that I finally have a working drill, I dispatched the project. I have only four more sets of blinds left to put up. Maybe I can do more than one in a day, since there's no enormous, immovable desk in front of those windows.
For the first time in the seventeen years since I built this room into a workroom (it used to be part of an oversize bedroom), it occurs to me that it is a corner office. (As in the "coveted corner office" you read about in business articles.) With windows on two walls! I must be somebody.
Mary Ann and I lunched in our default café, Zea. She had a small salad. For me, the filet mignon that the waitress last night warned me against. Zea gives you two of them with a red wine reduction and mushrooms for $27. Not bad.
The server here said that all the tuna dishes were unavailable. Funny, I said. That's what they told me last night at Christopher's on Carey. "Well, yes," the server said. "There's a worldwide shortage of tuna right now. You just can't get it."
How did I not know about that? I checked it out when I got home, and indeed, the Japanese are going wild because they can't get tuna for sushi. (I'm not kidding.) I usually brush off such reports as temporary phenomena, but something about this sends a chill down my spine. If we could almost completely clean out the entire population of cod in the North Atlantic, then no fish species is safe from overfishing.
Finished the Mother's Day page for this year, and got to work on the Jazz Festival eating guide. Looks like it's pretty much all the same vendors and dishes as last year, and the one before that, and the one before that. I can't decide whether this is good or bad.
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
