Live the Dream
or
Be the SOB

Who:      Tom Hammond – Southern Oregon Brewing

What:     Brewmaster Dinner

Where:   Bethany’s Table

When:    Saturday, February 20th – 6:30 pm

Tom Hammond and Anders Johansen

A lot of folks in the neighborhood brew their own beer. A lot more would like to and more of you yet are in constant pursuit of the next great brew. Saturday night, February 20^th you all have a chance to get together, meet Tom, drink great beer and eat some marvelous food. Five beers, five courses, a thousand laughs, forty-five bucks.

Show up between 6:30 and 7:00 to meet and greet. The appetizers will be served so that you can eat while you mingle. Then we’ll sit down for the next four courses. Tom will tell his stories, David will regale you with whatever occurs to him and Janet will feed you.

Here is what you’re in for:

1st Course
Beer:  Gold Digger
Food: Appetizer Platter – cheese, meats, tarts & almonds

2nd Course
Beer: Nice Rack IPA
Food: Warm Vegetable Salad with IPA Vinaigrette

3rd Course
Beer: Woodshed Red
Food: Chipolte “Borrachos” with Braised Pork Shoulder

4th Course
Beer: Imperial Ale – Bourbon Barrel Oak Aged
Food:  Beer Marinated Flank Steak with Fingerling Potatoes

5th Course
Beer: Pin-Up Porter
Food:  Chocolate Porter Mousse

Cost: $45 per person. Reservations (mostly) required. Call 503.614.0267, click on "Contact Us" or use the form below.

Laugh & Mingle With
Old & New Friends

Earlier in the evening we'll be serving a gorgeous meal (Click here to check out our New Years Eve Dinner). At 9 pm we will be resetting the restaurant to party until midnight. We will set out a buffet of great snacks and appetizers, we'll turn up the music and we'll be selling beverages.

The cost is $25 (to cover the cost of food) and one glass of bubbly is included at that price. Dinner guests may join in at no additional expense… because how much more could you possibly eat?

We will invite some folks with instruments. Maybe Amelia will bring her karaoke setup. It will be playful and a bit raucous. Permission to party will be granted at the door. And most of you can walk home.

Won't you come?

The Girls - Amber Lane & Annette Bergevin

It seems only natural that we begin this series with Bergevin Lane Vineyards from Walla Walla. Annette Bergevin and Amber Lane are a couple of spirited, fun-loving, irreverent cute chics who make great wine. (As anybody can tell by meeting Janet, David is a big fan of cute chics.)  Together with their winemaker Steffan Jorgenson, who brings a world of experience to his craft, Bergevin Lane practice a somewhat restrained style, coaxing extraordinary elegance from their wines. Bergevin Lane Vineyards is a sister stream in the world of wine to the Bethany’s Table freestyle approach to food and hospitality.

We will be serving four courses of food paired with great wines including their highly rated Syrah and amazing 2004 Horse Heaven Hills Cabernet Sauvignon – a great year! The cost is only $35 per person.

Make your reservation for November 13^th and 20^th. Arrive, as usual, between 6:30 and 7 pm. Seating is at 7.  Click Contact Us in the left panel to email your reservation or call us at (503) 614-0267.

Do you want to familiarize yourself with Bergevin Lane Vineyards? Click here to view the Bergevin Lane website.

The Lap of Bounty

Summer in this valley is indeed a demonstration project on Abundance. Every day we get lettuce, broccoli, green beans and an assortment of fruits and berries spilling from the farms that surround us. Oh the joy of it.

The response to our Buy Local! plan has been tremendous. Many of you have commented online but many more have stopped by to offer their support.  Thank you. It is gratifying to see how the possibility of saving the world by withdrawing our support from the Tyson dominated corn-fueled monster has resonated with the locals. You can read the entire article at BethanysTable.com/community-pages/buy-local/.

We have purchased our first steer and hog from Nick, a farmer near Carlton. No feedlot here, Nick is finishing this yearling steer with produce trim he picks up regularly from a nearby organic farm. Nick is very sensitive to how his animals are killed. He absolutely will not let his cattle see another animal killed as they find this extremely stressful so he will transport the steer to the butcher. He’ll transport the hg the next day.

This means that the money you pay to Bethany’s Table is being passed along to the likes of Mark Brooks, who ones the produce stand on 185th & West Union and sources from the farms that surround us, to a cattle and hog farmer in Carlton, and to a butcher in Mt. Angel.

Warm fuzziness all around.

We appreciate your support of this initiative.

Finding Our Way

These two near misses in our staffing plan can be scrutinized another day. Today we’ll review my performance as Mastermind. This month we have owned the business for a year. I bet we have reinvented the business fifteen times in the last twelve months. No kidding. Most of what we do, and will continue to do, we imagined when we bought the business. In hindsight I see that we imagined it like one imagines what the ground looks like while flying over it at 30,000 feet. The seemingly perfect view doesn’t give you a real sense of what it’s going to be like climbing over all those boulders once you’re actually on the ground.

I am reminded of that zany moment in 1981 after Ronald Reagan was shot. While Reagan lay in his hospital bed, Secretary of State Alexander Haig barged into a national news conference and declared to a stunned nation, "I'm in charge here!" Only, as every schoolchild knows, the Vice President (then George Bush the elder) was next in the chain of command. Haig was fourth in the line of succession and loaded on lithium at the time. Poor old Al was a bundle of insecurities and low self-esteem. He once complained to an associate, "I'm being undermined by weenies and second-rate hambones."

Recently, with me boldly and arduously leading the way, Janet tugged on my shirt and asked me, “Why are we climbing these boulders? Why don’t we just walk on that path over there?” I tried to explain to her that, “Mine is the Way of the Warrior! Paths are for weenies and hambones!” Shortly thereafter I collapsed in exhaustion and Janet drug me over the rocks and onto her path.

I think this will be much easier. Talent and experience are the tools Janet uses to make her way. When she is left free to simply do her work, people say ‘Yes!’ She is a chef and restaurateur. That’s who she is, that’s what she does. My main job now is to try and keep her from working herself to death. My jobs now, in order of priority are to 1) Keep the decks clear so that Janet can do her work, 2) act as your personal raconteur when you visit the restaurant and 3) pour wine. If I do well with the first job, things should get a lot easier around here. Wish me luck. Janet needs all the help she can get.

Angels At Our Table

The stars once spoke to man. It is world destiny that they are silent now To become aware of this silence Can be pain for earth humanity. But in the deepening silence There grows and ripens What man speak to the stars. To become aware of this speaking Can become strength for Spirit Man.

Rudolph Steiner

At Harvard Business School they probably don't instruct students to discuss strategic business decisions with their customers, particularly in terms of the evolution of the consciousness soul and world destiny. Perhaps they are right. Confining such conversations to the realm of "what" engenders a certain sense of solidity. Embracing woo-woo and the murky realm of "why" does have its downside. I posit here however that the concepts of what and why are best understood when packaged together. It's all about Faith.

Faith is much misunderstood. The word "faith" typically refers to knowledge and convictions that are not supported by material evidence or proof. It would be more useful if folks would simply settle for believing something without invoking faith in order to recast their beliefs as knowledge. Using faith to transmogrify beliefs into facts provides a false sense of security and often forestalls additional reasonable inquiry. It becomes a means to shelve some of life's greatest riddles.

Properly understood, Faith is not a substitute from of knowledge; Faith is an actualizing force. Faith was not essential in earlier epochs of evolution when "the Stars once spoke to man" and the relationship between human beings and the hierarchies was ordered much differently. But that was then, and this is now. Now we are left with only our own volition and powers of divination. Our angels no longer actuate their will directly through us but instead are chained to our bumbling and dithering. It is only when we act, when we take the "right" next step, that these angels are set free to do their work and to fulfill their own destinies. This freeing of the hierarchies is called Faith. Faith occurs when we use accurate intuition, or divination, and combine that knowledge with our courage and, accordingly, our Will. Faith is an actualizing force that unleashes the hierarchies and sets all manner of events into motion. Now that's leverage!

The real trick is to do our work and take the necessary steps before the angels get fed up with waiting and attempt to force our hand, usually by inspiring events to beat the tar out us. We have all had experiences in our lives that seemed so upsetting at the time and now, looking back, we see perfect wisdom. We look around and see people we love that we wouldn't have met or find ourselves doing fulfilling work that we would never have discovered but for these upsetting events in our past. Yet wouldn't it have been nice if we could have found our way without the beatings?

Such is the perusing of ownership these days at Bethany's Table as we chart our next steps. It was seemingly serendipity that landed us in this business when the previous owner, David's sister Shelley, threw in the towel. In just a year we have danced and gyrated our way into an enterprise that bears very little resemblance to the business we acquired. We have been clinging to the original conception of our core business to be selling prepared meals. Since Janet is a trained chef, we distinguished our offerings as upgraded from the Dinners Ready menu by branding them as "restaurant quality meals". We started serving lunch to better use the space that was once filled with stainless steel carts and to get people through the door. We started hosting wine tastings in order to feature meals from our menu. One thing lead to another and we started the "What's For Dinner" program with nightly offerings of four to five entrees from our test kitchen. Now we have a full menu and serve dinner five nights per week. Wine tastings and group events are common occurrences.

The transaction volume from lunch and dinner has outpaced prepared meal sales by a significant factor. Yet we have continued to define ourselves as a prepared meal business that is also a restaurant. But this is no longer true. We have unwittingly become a restaurant that also sells prepared meals. We no longer need to brand the meals as "restaurant quality". Of course they are restaurant quality. We are a restaurant; and a good one. So we have decided to remake the meal business to into a more natural offshoot of the restaurant. This singleness of purpose will simplify our message and enhance creativity. The prepared meals menu will be pared down but more flexible with a greater emphasis on seasonality and fresh foods.

Let's hope this makes the angels happy. We could use the leverage.

Menu Changes

The restaurant menu and the prepared meals menu each boast a number of new items this month. The big change however is in the number of items that have been pruned from the prepared meals menu. We apologize to those of you who will mourn the removal of your favorites. Yet because you loved the Meatloaf, the Chicken Cordon Bleu, the Shrimp Ravioli, etc. we kept them on the menu month after month. Each month it grew tougher to make room for new items and maintaining inventory became more and more cumbersome. And the menu got a bit stale.

The work to manage the monster take-home meal menu has been clogging up our work. We will continue to emphasize the family friendly “Crowd Pleaser” meals. Specialty meals inspired by the current season will fill out the remainder of the menu. We still offer Kids Meals (you can use the Teen Burritos to bale you out all summer). Fresh vegetables and salads are always available.

Jim the Duke of Soup churns out new concoctions faster than we can keep track of him so we have decided to fill your soup orders directly from the specials board when you come into the store. At least one vegetarian soup will always be available. Recycle! Bring your own container and save 50 cents.

Click here to View Downloadable Menus.

Or click here to Order Online.

Let us know your opinion of these changes by commenting below.