Hello Friday,

And hello from beautiful Pattaya, Thailand, which has a bit of a reputation as a red light district, but is also apparently host to an annual family friendly four day music festival that is trying to be some kind of Coachella / Burning Man / new age Ted Talk conference for Southeast Asia.

We brought the kids to Wonderfruit! Wish us luck. Will report back.

BUT FIRST: A Family Meal holiday update: This will be the final Family Meal of 2022. Normally the newsletter keeps trucking more or less on schedule through the holidays, but this year I need a break. Next Family Meal will go out on Friday, January 3rd.

Follow me on Instagram and Twitter for takes and retweets between now and then. I promise to be as active as possible!

I stole my Twitter banner from a tea shop sign in Hong Kong and I love it.

Luckily, this break jives nicely with a dearth of big stories in the restaurant world. Only added one new piece today on top of Tuesday’s paid version, so I’m nixing the usual break between editions. (Couldn’t get excited about the endless roundups out there, sorry!)

Paid subscribers will recognize “The Long Shot” as the beginning of Tuesday’s. Everyone else:

Let’s get to it…

The Bleached Reef – Ghost kitchen giant Reef’s retreat has been in the news for a while now, but this week, Willamette Week has a longread on the company’s rise and fall in Portland, OR worth checking out. Of note, Sophie Peel reports: “A Reef Technology spreadsheet obtained by WW that lists ghost kitchen sales and revenue across 37 cities in 2020 and 2021 shows that the company last year made an average of $17,858 a day from its Portland ghost kitchens—that’s $6.5 million a year.”

The Reef trailers parked all over town were supposed to be cranking out orders and minting money, but per Peel, “Average daily revenue per vessel was $1,021, with an average of 37 orders a day per vessel.”

The Long Shot – With congress still working out how to fund the federal government, the holidays fast approaching, and an imminent shift in House leadership, I gotta say, this sounds a bit far-fetched, but…. “One of the authors of the original [Restaurant Revitalization Fund] legislation is fighting for a tax credit that would give a much-needed boost to restaurants that lost out the first time around. U.S. Senator Ben Cordin (D-Md.), along with his colleagues Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) have introduced the Restaurant Revitalization Fund Tax Credit Act, which if passed, would allow the approximately 175,000 businesses that did not receive RRF funding to offset part of their payroll taxes in 2023.” Hail Mary details via Joanna Fantozzi in Restaurant Hospitality.

The Media – RIP Munchies. Semafor’s Max Tani reports, “Two Vice staffers told Semafor that the company quietly let go of employees at its food vertical Munchies and its music vertical Noisey. The millennial media company plans to leave the sites and their social pages up, but will largely stop producing content for Munchies.”

For The Somm: The Profile Treatment – A rare full sommelier profile focuses on Vincent Morrow in the SF Chronicle this week, running through his time at The French Laundry, Gary Danko, Benu, and One65 before arriving at the Press, where Morrow won Michelin’s California Somm of the Year award this year. Some cool stuff outside the cellar: Jess Lander says Morrow “has spearheaded upcoming partnerships [between the Court of Master Sommeliers and] historically Black colleges and universities, which will give students the chance to take the court’s $700 introductory course for free. The committee recently made this course available online for the first time, too, in addition to offering 100 annual scholarships to underrepresented hospitality professionals or those who couldn’t afford it. Starting this year, the advanced sommelier exam — the third level before the master sommelier exam — is available to anyone who is interested. In the past, candidates had to be invited and, more recently, pass a pre-test.”

"Morrow is one of only four Black master sommeliers in the world.”

Some Sad News – Per Paolo Bicchieri and Dianne de Guzman in Eater SF, “David Golovin, the chef and owner behind Dear Inga, the Mission District restaurant known for its Eastern European food, died on November 17 at the age of 41. The cause of death was colon cancer. His storied San Francisco hospitality career spanned restaurants including Rubicon, Spruce, Village Pub, Nopa, and La Folie before he opened Dear Inga in September 2019.”

And Last but not Least – Pete Wells has a “critic’s notebook” piece in the NYT this week, ostensibly about how real estate firm Tishman Speyer made “Rockefeller Center the New York Restaurant Event of the Year,” but I think we can all agree it’s really just him warming us all up for the restaurant-based sci-fi book he’s clearly been writing for years. No? Explain this line to me:

“A downtown restaurant called King is home base for the three women who own Jupiter.”

And that’s it for today.

And that’s it for 2022! Here’s to a fantastic next year for all of us. Or at least much, much, better.

And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Instagram, and send tips and/or the New York restaurant event of the year to andrew@thisfamilymeal.com. If you like Family Meal and want to keep it going, please chip in here. If you got this as a forward, sign up for yourself!

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Reefs doing 37 covers a day, and final Family…