Harry's failure
 

Drive up for an Anniversary dinner. No Blue Cheese dressing. No French fries. No Bananas Foster. Not worth the drive.

Too far to drive for dinner anyway.

Missing out on many good restaurants if your not willing to occasionally take a drive. Went to Cocoa Beach for dinner yesterday evening.

Who is Harry.

Harry's Seafood Bar and Grille
24 S.E. 1st Avenue
Ocala, FL 34471
352-840-0900

How do you run out of potatoes?

Can always buy frozen in an emergency

I have enough trouble driving back from the squares to our village when I am drunk, let alone from restaurants and bars outside the bubble! :)

Maybe it was Healthy Day at Harry's.

Harry's
 

Unfortunately, last 2 times we went, we were disappointed. We always enjoyed going there.

Raise ya one or two: Darrells in Spanish Spring this morning; no home fries(potatoes), no cream/half half(offered powdered ‘creamer’), no pancakes(flour), etc. blamed it on a delivery…they are 50 yards from full service grocery store….also messed up order to boot.

Welcome to COVID Supply Chain fiascos. Try buying a brick of Cream Cheese in Publix (or any where else).

Toilet Paper? We have tons of it now. Not going to let that happen again.

Skip

We have 5 favorite, locally owned restaurants that we go to when we are back home. Each of them is having problems with suppliers and help.

One of them is closing its doors after 46 years. Their announcement brought with it a flashback of a part of our married lives. . .

When Mr. Boomer and I were first married in the 1970s, we could not afford to go there.

Later we could afford go there, but only on special occasions — for their award-winning brunch.

(When they re-opened “after” the pandemic, the brunch was gone. One of the servers told us that brunches require a lot of staff which they did not have. (I hope all of us always tipped well at a brunch because a lot of people were working their butts off for you — but maybe you did not notice.)

I think also that brunches, no matter how higher-end, how beautifully presented and inviting, are now a thing of the past, forever, because of how some fellow-diners, in line, too, are not the most careful with health precautions.)

Now, in our “mature” years, we could go to this restaurant whenever we wanted to and had started back.

We were there recently, and although the food was just as good, the servers were very young. They did fine, but we missed seeing the older servers who had been there for a long time.

(I suspect that many older servers who have worked for years in well-known local restaurants — where the tips were especially good and the management treated them with respect and knew how to build a team — have decided it is time to protect their health and so have hung up their sensible shoes.)

I have heard supplies were becoming more impossible to get. This place was known for their desserts, especially cheesecake, and now I hear that cream cheese is really hard to find. I have also heard the supply truck is making only a centralized stop so managers have to drive to one spot to pick up their orders — and that their orders are not always everything they need.

The restaurant I am talking about here is called The Grand Finale. . .how sadly ironic it is that. . .they must end. . .”not with a bang but a whimper.”

Boomer. (with a nod to T. S. Eliot)

I can accept a lot but no cream cheese for my morning breakfast is just too much.

We have been to Harry’s a couple of times and enjoyed it. One of those times, we also went to the art museum in Ocala and took the scenic route home.

I just read an article in Ocala Magazine magazine. It was an old article from a few years ago. I found it online. It said Harry’s is a family-owned restaurant that keeps the same servers forever. (I assume that is still the case, even though the article was an old one.)

I hope Harry’s gets past these supply issues soon.

We are losing so many things we have enjoyed in the past and taken for granted — including many of our small restaurants that seem to be under siege, like the one I posted about earlier. One of my longtime favorites, at home, gave up last week — forever.

I cringe to think that this mess we have been in for two years will leave us with only fast food, big chain restaurants that will turn us into pillars of salt — I guess I should say pillars of sodium — but that does not have quite the same ring to it.

So many places are taking a huge hit.

Damn. This thing needs to be done.

Grouchy Boomer

Between supply line issues and lack of employees in manufacturing and food processing plants, lack of Covid tests, lack of willing and available workers... and now with cases absolutely soaring everywhere.... I guess that's the new "normal"... what did D.C. tell us a couple years ago... something about 60 days or 90 says to "stem the tide" or some such thing... :ohdear::ohdear: