Dear Friends,
Hurray! No Mayan doomsday! We have a New Year!
Wonderful things happened at Rialto in 2012. Two members of our staff were married, we welcomed 5 new members to our management team, we hosted an audience with his holiness, the Dalai Lama, we cooked in New York and Boston to celebrate Partners in Health's 25th anniversary, and Rialto was honored to be the site for Share Our Strength's annual No Kid Hungry dinner in Boston--letting us cook with old pals Gordon Hamersley, Andy Husbands, Jeremy Sewell and Joanne Chang. And of course, YOU were there, the most interesting group of people ever to grace a restaurant dining room.
With a new year, a clean slate and some fresh faces we're excited about the 2013 changes you'll see at Rialto: a beautiful facelift in our bar; winter travels on our dining room menu to Piedmont and Val D'Aosta (think big red wines, game, truffles and mountain cheeses). We're introducing a new 4-course vegetarian tasting menu that includes a gluten-free pasta. You can find it below paired with kale in the pantry section.
A note on New Year's resolutions.
Last Saturday, Ken, Roxanne and I were en route home from the Big Apple in the snow. A sign for the Blue Colony Diner caught our attention on 84E in Connecticut and we pulled off at Exit 10 for a late lunch. We made it off the ramp and into the diner parking lot before the giant flag suspended at half mast from a crane across the road tipped me to where we'd landed.
We were in Newtown, about 500 yards up the road from the Sandy Hook Elementary School.
It seemed wrong not to stay for lunch, but I can understand why others might think otherwise. Messages of condolence scribbled on the back of diner placemats covered the foyer windows; inside, ordinary Christmas lights twinkled above the booths, except the ribbons on the lights were black, not red. We ordered and ate, almost normally. At the end of our meal the woman behind the cash register told Ken the town just wanted to be left alone, to be given a chance to heal. We didn't stop at the school. Enough people have done that already. I have one New Year's resolution: Every time some inconsequential obstacle drops down in front of me, I'm going to try to remember to take a breath and hold the people of Newtown in my heart before I say another word. May all of us find peace in 2013.
XOX, |