Soup is Good Food

Maureen says:
While Tom's been focused on equipment and logistics (the demo started on Wednesday), I've been nursing a cold and directing what little energy I do have into two major projects at work. The lovely thing about having both a laptop and a wireless Internet connection at home is that one can, if so inclined, work from the comfort of a warm bed. I haven't as of yet, but I might: each time I think this cold has peaked, it worsens a bit. What started as a head cold has, this morning, moved into my chest.

Tom's feeling heaps better, though, and seems to have made it his mission to keep me in pots of soup. Earlier in the week it was a spicy Pho with chicken and ground pork, that, like most soups, was even better the second day. Last night, minutes after walking through the door, he started in on what he calls his Safety Soup. Safety Soup, so named in the early days of his career when du jour on the menu meant cooking a pot every two days, is easy to make, simple in essence and positively nourishing. If you do any cooking at all, you probably have your own version of Safety Soup. Tom's is tomato-based, contains the usual aromatics (carrots, celery, onion, etc.), chunks of chicken and tiny slabs of bacon (of course), seasoned with salt and pepper. If I asked him for the recipe, he'd say there was none and advise you to make it up as you go along which, for someone like me, is about as helpful an answer as 'cook it until it's done'.

All this is to say that I haven't visited the restaurant since Monday evening. I haven't seen the space emptied of table and chairs, haven't seen where the bar used to be (knocked down, gone, bye-bye), haven't seen the how the color we chose to paint the tin ceiling honors the decorative relief, haven't seen the primer on the walls, haven't seen anything that isn't an 'art shot' (further investigation led us to the conclusion that the blurry-photo issue lies with Tom's unsteady hand, not the camera).

But I have been moving along with writing content for the formal Web site, creative discussions with our Web designer, working with the agency on print production, talking with promotional item vendors about match boxes and coasters, and voicing pointed opinions on server/bartender uniforms, of which I have many.

Speaking of which, I'm of the pointed opinion that the folks at Tylen0l must have been under the influence of their own cold/flu products when they chose to coat their multi-symptom cold relief caplets in "cool burst". They're not chewables; you're supposed to swallow them. Perhaps this is targeted marketing for the segment of their customer base who takes caplets without water and complained about the subsequent medicine mouth. In which case, I'd like to suggest that the team responsible for package design put the phrase "cool burst" in significantly larger type as I purchased them quite by accident and was unpleasantly surprised by the taste of sickly-sweet mint (read: nauseated).