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Alicia Lini joins me Thursday, July 16 for a virtual wine dinner at ROMA in Houston.

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I’m thrilled to announce that Alicia Lini (above), one of my best friends in the wine business and producer of some of my favorite Lambruscos, will be joining me for a virtual wine dinner on Thursday, July 16 at ROMA here in Houston.

Alicia and I first met more than a decade ago while I was working in the wine trade in New York. The launch of her brand was my first major campaign as a media consultant and its success shaped my career for the decade to come.

A few years ago, Alicia asked me to give her hand promoting her brand again here in the U.S. and it’s been another immensely rewarding experience — especially because of our friendship.

Next Thursday, she’ll be joining me for an ongoing series of virtual wine dinners I’ve been leading for ROMA, where I’ve been running media for owner Shanon Scott for a few years now.

These events have taken on a truly magical feel: they are a world unto themselves, where everyone can cast away the worries, pressures, and stress of what’s happening around our families.

They sell out regularly and we have capped them at 25 couples and/or individuals so that everyone can be onscreen throughout.

Chef Angelo Cuppone and Shanon are working on the menu as I write this and I’ll share as soon we publish it on the restaurant’s website and social media.

Alicia and I have shared so many unforgettable moments over the course of our time working together. Here’s the story of how she and I ended up in a green room with Pattie Boyd, the woman who inspired some of the greatest love songs of all time.

Houston wine and food friends: please join us next Thursday for what is sure to be a great evening of Lambursco and classic Emilian cuisine (email or PM me if you want me to hold a spot for you).

Thank you for your support and solidarity. Tracie, the girls, and I are still hunkered down, healthy and safe in our house in southwest Houston. But our city and state continue to report record numbers of daily contagions and hospitalizations. And members of our extended family continue to battle the virus. COVID-19 is real. We are seeing it firsthand. Please where a mask when you go out and stay home if you can. Support those who have no other choice but to work outside their homes. G-d bless America. G-d bless us all.

Parzen family update: Houston in crisis but we are healthy and safe.

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It happened to our sisters and brothers in Italy. It happened to our fellow Americans in New York. And now it’s happening here in Houston where we live.

COVID-19 is overwhelming our city’s health care system, Houston-area hospitals are already beyond capacity and they are expecting an even greater surge early next week. People are suffering and dying all around us, including many in our family’s social circles.

Thankfully, our governor has finally come to his senses — how could he not at this point? — and has made masks mandatory for nearly all Texans while in public. The order was long overdue: in late April, his executive order made it impossible for local government officials to issue their own public mask requirements. But we are just grateful that it’s here.

Tracie, the girls, and I are in isolation and we are all healthy and safe. And everyone in our immediate Texas family is also healthy and safe.

We have been extremely fortunate and will remain vigilant.

Thank you to everyone who’s written to us to check in. Those messages really mean the world to us.

G-d bless Houston, G-d bless Texas, G-d bless America, and may G-d bless all Their children across the earth.

Please stay safe, no matter where you are.

Parzen family update from Houston.

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On Friday, local media here in Houston reported that ICU capacity had already hit 100 percent and health officials are expecting an “‘unsustainable surge capacity’ of intensive care beds by July 6 [Monday].”

Also on Friday, the governor of Texas ordered all bars in the state to close, restaurants to reduce capacity, and hospitals to stop performing elective surgery.

The bottomline is that Houston has become one of the world’s pandemic epicenters. At least one health expert, a locally based international authority on infectious disease, has said that Houston may become the “worst affected city in America.”

(For those wanting to understand how we got here, I highly recommend this New York Times “Daily” podcast featuring the paper’s Texas bureau chief, Manny Fernandez. As he says and the end of the interview, it really comes down to “world view.”)

Tracie, the girls, and I are safe and healthy. And everyone in our immediate Texas family is also safe and healthy. Even as things started opening up here at the beginning of May, we have remained vigilant and have been very careful about avoiding exposure.

We are very fortunate to live in a residential neighborhood where we can walk and exercise while maintaining social distancing. We do all our grocery shopping using curbside pick up.

Tracie and I really appreciate the concern and the thoughts and wishes from our friends. Thank you for that. It means a lot to us. We have been very lucky throughout the crisis and we will continue to stay safe. Heartfelt thanks for all the messages we have received.

A pandemic-era wine sales strategy that works at Roma in Houston.

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best italian houstonIn the wake of yesterday’s post (“The age of arrogance is over. Winemakers, please check your hubris at the (virtual) door!”), a lot of people have asked me about the restaurant that had organized the virtual wine dinner.

It’s a “trattoria inspired” independent venue called Roma in Rice Village, the Houston neighborhood where Rice University is located. I help out with its online presence.

Owner Shanon Scott is a Houston restaurant trade veteran and one of our community’s most beloved restaurateurs. A former maître d’ at some of the city’s highest-profile Italian dining destinations, he opened his own place in a classic Houston-style bungalow about three and half years ago. He’s also become a good friend of ours over the years. I love working with him and share his passion for great Italian cuisine.

Every week, he hosts a virtual wine dinner: guests (mostly couples) pick up their food and three bottles of wine between 5-7 p.m. each Thursday and then settle in around a computer or smart phone with a Zoom link. Most Thursdays, a winemaker or winery ambassador from Italy dials in as well and leads the participants through the wines. I serve as event moderator.

The campaign has been highly successful for both Roma and the distributor Shanon’s partnered with, Impero Wine Distributors, a Florida-based importer with wholesale operations scattered across the U.S.

pasta with tuna and capersThe man in the back of the house, Angelo Cuppone, is a classically trained chef from Pesaro (the Marches, Italy) and his cooking style is classic. My favorite dishes there are the lasagne and the carbonara but our 11-year-old cousin (whose family lives down the street) is partial to the grilled octopus. All the prosciutto they serve is sliced on a Berkel — another huge plus in our book. The restaurant is one of our extended Houston family’s go-tos.

For those who have never worked in the food service industry, it may be hard to fathom what a challenging time this is for food and wine professionals. Landlords don’t stop charging rents even when pandemics force lockdowns and catastrophic loss of business. And restaurant workers — from dishwashers to back waiters to line cooks to servers — have rents to pay and kids to feed even when an epidemic forces restaurateurs to entirely reimagine their business models.

Scores of Houston restaurants have permanently shuttered their doors in recent weeks. Bernie’s Burger Bus, for example, an immensely popular independent Houston hamburger chain (the kitchen was housed in a yellow school bus), had just begun an expansion when the virus arrived. No one in our community could believe that such a successful model could fall victim to COVID-19. But it did.

Similarly, the wine trade has been decimated by the fallout. Last week, Southern Glazer’s, one of our nation’s largest wholesalers, laid off most of its sales force according to anecdotal reports. I recently contacted its Houston sales office to help out a restaurant owner friend in Orange, Texas (where Tracie grew up). He wanted to set up an account with company to service his new wine program. The sales rep I spoke to told me that he is the sole agent taking orders for Southeast Texas. I can’t imagine that Southern Glazer’s will share the exact number of fired workers but the fact that there’s just one rep for such a huge swath of Texas is an indication that it’s currently working with a skeleton crew.

In my view, Shanon and his Impero sales rep, Melania Spagnoli, are true heroes. The virtual wine dinner model they’ve created is “moving boxes” (wine tradespeak for selling wine) in a perilous time and it’s helping to feed a lot of families — including my own.

Food photos by Al Torres Photography.

Houston removes Confederate statues in time for Juneteenth.

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By the time a Houston-based activist arrived on the scene yesterday, all that was left of a United Daughters of the Confederacy statue of Confederate commander Dick Dowling was a broken, jackhammered pedestal (above) and a desecrated dedication stone (below).

The Dowling statue was one of two monuments that were removed in Houston this week.

After gatherings at the site of the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville, Virginia turned violent in 2017, Houston mayor Sylvester Turner formed a commission to study the repurposing of the city’s Confederate monuments. Earlier that year, he had already announced that the name of Dowling St., the main artery of one of Houston’s historically black neighborhoods, would be changed to Emancipation Ave.

But after sweeping public outcry in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis and Virginia governor Ralph Northam’s announcement that the Lee statue in Richmond would be removed, mayor Turner decided that the time was right to remove these hateful and offensive tributes to the men who defended racist violence and genocide. (While mayor Turner was able to move forward with the removal this week, yesterday a judge barred Governor Northam from removing the Lee statue indefinitely.)

Today, Houston residents will be able to observe Emancipation Day — Juneteenth — without the long dark shadow of these monuments cast over their celebration.

Unfortunately, due to the ongoing global health crisis, there will be no public gathering today at Houston’s Emancipation Park (below).

The park, established by black business leaders who purchased the land in 1872, was the site of some of the earliest celebrations of Juneteenth.

Thanks to the heightened interest in the holiday this year, many Americans have learned for the first time that Juneteenth can trace its origins to Galveston and Houston, the last cities in America to receive news of the Confederacy’s demise and black Americans’ newfound liberation from bondage.

Given the current public discourse on racism in this country, Juneteenth observances have particular significance and urgency this year.

May we all take this day to reflect on how we can become better American ancestors.

Happy Juneteenth from the Parzen family in Houston, Texas.

Please consider donating to and/or sharing our GoFundMe campaign to repurpose a newly built Confederate memorial in Orange, Texas where Tracie grew up and where half the population is black.

Please join our protest of the Confederate memorial in Orange, Texas tomorrow. Please donate to our campaign to raise an MLK billboard across from the site.

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Tracie and I were already planning tomorrow’s protest of the newly built Confederate memorial in Orange, Texas where she grew up when we were contacted a couple of young women, sisters, who live there. They wanted to organize their own protest, they told us, and they were asking for our help.

The flyer below was designed by the older of the two, a recent college grad on her way to medical school.

If two young people like them have the courage to stand up against racist iconography like the “Confederate Memorial of the Wind,” then I truly believe there’s hope for our cause.

They’ll be there with us tomorrow, from 10 a.m. – 12 p.m., as we protest Confederate flags planted along Martin Luther King, Dr. — one of the city’s main arteries — in 2017.
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G-d bless George Floyd and his family. May he give us the strength to “remain awake through a great revolution.”

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Photo by Lorie Schaull (via Flickr Creative Commons).

Today, less than three miles from our home in Houston, Texas, George Floyd will be remembered by family, friends, and dignitaries at the Fountain of Praise Church.

Early this morning, Manny Fernandez, the New York Times Houston bureau chief, published this biography of Mr. Floyd. I highly recommend it.

I can’t stop thinking this morning about how George Floyd is a Christlike figure. Reading the story of his life, I learned that he had lost his way in his own desert before he decided to devote himself to helping others escape the chains of growing up poor and disenfranchised. Like Christ, he became a true martyr for social change when he was killed by those police officers. And his name, like that of Jesus, is today spoken by people across the world as a synecdoche for failed justice.

In June, 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a commencement speech at Oberlin College in Ohio. The title was “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” Dr. King’s words resonate as deeply today as they did on a June day 55 years ago:

    Let nobody give you the impression that the problem of racial injustice will work itself out. Let nobody give you the impression that only time will solve the problem. That is a myth, and it is a myth because time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. And I’m absolutely convinced that the people of ill will in our nation — the extreme rightists — the forces committed to negative ends — have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the vitriolic works and violent actions of the bad people who bomb a church in Birmingham, Alabama, or shoot down a civil rights worker in Selma, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, “Wait on time.” Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals. Without this hard work, time becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.

G-d bless George Floyd and his family. May G-d give us the strength to “stay awake.”

How we talk to our kids about racism in America and a list of antiracist resources.

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Above: 60,000 people marched alongside George Floyd’s family yesterday in Houston. He was born and raised in the city’s Third Ward.

Our daughters, ages 6 and 8, are nonplussed by some of their parents’ dinner table conversations these days.

“Why would anyone be mean to someone because they are black?” asked our youngest Lila Jane the other night.

After all, they live in what the Los Angeles Times has called “the most diverse place in America,” a city where they and their parents interact with every gradation of humanity every single day.

Tracie and I are trying our best to raise them as antiracists. But at their age, it’s hard for them to grasp the terrible legacy of racism in the U.S.

How do you explain to an eight- and six-year-old that a black man from our city, not much younger than their father, was brutally killed by a police officer simply because they suspected him of possessing a counterfeit $20 bill? How do you explain that three other police officers stood idly by as the man begged for his life and passersby pleaded with them to relent?

The other night at dinner they asked us point blank what had happened to George Floyd and why.

I make a living by speaking and writing. My friends often tease me that I always have something to say about everything under the sun.

But my voice failed me in that moment. I know the answer but I could not summon the words to articulate the explanation in a way that they would understand.

It will take years for them to wrap their minds around the disgraceful, ugly history of racism in our country.

“Some white people don’t like black people,” I told them.

“Why, daddy?” they asked.

“Because some white people think they are better than them,” I said.

They love their black classmates, they protested, clearly confused by what I had just told them.

“Some white people are mean to black people because they think they are better than them,” I said again.

“Why would someone be mean to my friend L [her classmate] at school?” asked Lila Jane.

“I don’t know the answer,” I said.

“But, daddy, you know everything!” said Georgia.

“I wish I did, sweetheart,” I said running my hands through Lila Jane’s long lockdown hair. “I wish I did.”

Tracie and I are trying the best we can to teach them how to be antiracists. But right now, the best way we can do that — we believe — is by example.

A good friend of ours asked me to share the below resources here on the blog. It arrived in his inbox via MBS.works via The New Happy.

I’m still searching for an answer for our girls. Someday I hope to find it. In the meantime, we’re trying to be “better ancestors.”

Thanks for being here and please have a look at the links below.

*****

“It is not enough to be non-racist, we must be antiracist.” — Angela Davis

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” — MLK Jr.

How sommeliers are keeping guests (and themselves) safe as dine-in service resumes in Houston.

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Please check out my post today for the Houston Press on how sommeliers are keeping guests and themselves safe as dine-in service resumes in our city.

It’s a challenging time to be a restaurant worker, even if you are a wine director overseeing a world-class cellar.

Texas is one of the first states to allow restaurants to reopen. As all of the wine professionals I spoke to noted, there is no model for how to execute wine service safely. And neither the state or federal government have provided adequate guidance.

A mere 11 days have passed since our state’s governor superseded local orders to isolate, wear masks, and keep restaurants and other businesses closed. There are anecdotal reports of numerous restaurateurs not following social distancing protocols. But everyone I talked to for this piece is taking it extremely seriously. I was surprised by what some of them told me (including those who didn’t end up in the post).

Thanks for checking it out and please stay safe.

Texas restaurants reopen today and it scares me to hell.

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Image via Adobe Stock.

“Let me just say that it is my hope that with the measures that are being put in place that our numbers will not spike… That is my hope.”

Those are the words of our city’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, speaking at a news conference Monday, April 27 following Texas governor Greg Abbott’s announcement that the state would “reopen” today, May 1.

Mayor Turner and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo (our city manager) had planned to keep Houston’s “Stay Home/Work Safe” order in place and they had just announced that masks would be mandatory when Abbott decided to supersede all local measures to combat the spread of the deadly virus.

It was the latest volley in Abbott’s ongoing war on local authority in our state. Since coming into office, he has lobbied assiduously to punish cities like Houston and Austin for their status as sanctuary cities and for their progressive policies on reproductive rights.

This week, he took it a step further: now he’s playing with life and death.

In just a few hours, scores of restaurants across Houston will begin opening their doors for “dine-in” service. Abbott has ordered that they can only operate at 25 percent capacity. But beyond that, he’s given no guidance on how restaurateurs can keep their staff and customers safe and how they can curb COVID-19’s spread.

Some in our city are looking to Georgia’s example. The state’s governor, Brian Kemp, issued these guidelines for reopening restaurants last week (Georgia’s restaurants were allowed to reopen on Monday).

But with no official norms or regulations in place, Houston’s restaurant managers are on their own in terms of how they operate and what safety measures they adopt.*

In other words, it’s the wild west when it comes to culinary hygiene. Concerned (however courageous) restaurant-goers have no way of knowing with confidence what safety protocols restaurants owners have put into place, if any.

I understand the economic logic behind reopening. And I recognize that Texas has “flattened the curve.” But on the same day that “Texas reports most deaths in a day from COVID-19” (a story that appears on the landing page of the Houston Chronicle this morning), wouldn’t it be prudent to provide businesses like restaurants — where proper hygiene is always essential for safety — with more robust guidance?

Just like the families of countless wine professionals across our state, ours is struggling to make ends meet in the time of the pandemic. It’s my hope that we’ll all be able to get back to work as soon as possible. But without the proper guidance, Abbot’s order is a genuine gastronomic “go to Hell” to Houston and Austin where local authorities have fought to keep restrictions in place.

Texas reopens today and I am scared as hell for dishwashers, prep cooks, line cooks, waitstaff, sommeliers, and the customers they will serve.

This isn’t political. It’s just common sense.

I encourage you to watch Mayor Turner’s news conference. His remarks moved me to tears when I watched them in real time. He and Judge Hidalgo are true American heroes.

*”‘Reopened services’ shall consist of the following,” wrote Abbott in his decree, listing which businesses could reopen today, including dining establishments: “Dine-in restaurant services, for restaurants that operate at up to 25 percent of the total listed occupancy of the restaurant…”

He specifies that the order only applies to restaurants “that have less than 51 percent of their gross receipts from the sale of alcoholic beverages” and he also prohibits valet parking except for “except for vehicles with placards or plates for disabled parking.”

But there is no mention of masks, gloves, hand-washing, or testing, for example.

In all fairness to our heartless governor, he does offer an overarching recommendation that reopened businesses “should implement social distancing… and practice good hygiene, environmental cleanliness, and sanitation.” But it’s just advice, not an order. “Individuals are encouraged to wear appropriate face coverings,” he writes, “but no jurisdiction can impose a civil or criminal penalty for failure to wear a face covering.”