We Rise Again

My sister and brother-in-law Kate and Josh own restaurants in Colorado.  These are beautiful places to eat - each is staffed with lovely, talented people and each serves delicious food.  It’s all been brought to a halt by this crummy virus - a life’s work at a standstill. But they have not let that stop them.  They’ve re-jiggered the spots they can to keep people working and those they can’t they’ve managed to close with grace and an “until soon” to their workers. They turned a food hall into a grocery of sorts, they serve takeout and to-go cocktails, they’ve built cook-at-home versions of their dishes for Boulderites and they’re serving hundreds of lunches to hospital workers, not to mention shepherding their two boys through school at home. They’re both exhausted, as you can imagine, like all the other worried restaurant owners and workers country-wide.

Their Boulder restaurant River and Woods is known far-and-Colorado-wide for it’s Friday-night-challah:

Every Friday afternoon for four years, our kitchen has been filled with the aroma of that dough rising throughout the day, and every Friday night, we have broken bread with our community. It’s been our nod to a celebration of life. When we break that bread, we’re reminded to pause, to consider what it means to be alive in this very moment, before the details dissipate like a fragrance from the kitchen.

They had to jettison the challah at first, and this was tragic because it’s that good. But by a miracle they were able to get it going again, right before Passover, and Josh wrote this beautiful missive to include with every order of the bread. Please read it - Josh’s writing is a gift. His words are an “act of kindness, of generosity, of patience” that I hope bring you some inspiration and sustenance when both those things feel scarce.