Soon, with the support of local chefs, farmers, and other food community types (including Crooked Sky Farms and Fox Restaurant Concepts), The Joy Bus became The Joy Bus Diner, a Shea Boulevard restaurant (3375 East Shea Boulevard, to be exact) whose profits fund the food-delivery campaign. The organization’s board is a Who’s Who of local food professionals including Tracy Dempsey (Tracy Dempsey’s Originals), Gio Osso (Virtu Honest Craft), and Bernie Kantak (Citizen Public House, The Gladly).
That tony board was resistant when Caraway suggested a four-walls diner. “They were reminding me how hard it is to run a restaurant,” Caraway recalls. “And I was saying, ‘Yeah, but I know that. It’s all I’ve ever done.’”
I don’t like hair band music, and I wouldn’t know Riot if they entered me from behind. But I share my friend’s enthusiasm for old LPs in pristine condition. And I understand why he has to call me with his good news: No one else really cares.
For most folks who buy records, either those who always have or those returning to the hobby during vinyl’s new resurgence, owning a super-clean copy of a beloved album means getting to enjoy some of your favorite music without the clicks and pops that can spoil listening pleasure. But some of us take the importance of record condition maybe a little too far.
Raising the sub-minimum wage would level the playing field for service workers, Holland said. Right now, the federal wage for tipped workers is $2.13. (In Arizona, the minimum wage for such workers is significantly higher, though: $9.15.)
“If we can get Sinema to commit to raising it to $15 an hour, with tips on top, we can bring respect and dignity to the service industry,” Holland said. “That would mean I don’t have to tolerate the atrocious behavior of some patrons, where I’m thinking, ‘Wow, this guy is being rude, he isn’t going to tip me, and without his tip, I’ve already got a lousy paycheck.’”
And then a few years ago the convenience store near my home began offering house-made burritos. I noticed because the line that formed each weekday outside the store was, one Tuesday, blocking my path to the gas pump. While I wasn’t looking, the quickie-mart warming oven full of wrinkled hot dogs and foil-wrapped “hamburgers” had morphed into a full-on kitchen that produced, one of the people in the burrito line told me, some of the best machaca in all of Maricopa County.
I added this to my list of
Things to Worry About Later, where it remained until last week, when I received a press release announcing that QuikTrip Corporate Chef Ryan Boone planned to unveil a new side dish.
Cat Spencer still runs into people who want to talk about Radix Gallery, the downtown Phoenix art space she ran more than 30 years ago.
“I did a pop-up show in Scottsdale for Cliff Benjamin a while ago,” Spencer said last week from one of her homes in New York. “People kept coming up to me to tell stories about Radix and the art they bought there.”
Spencer’s gallery was a late-’80s anomaly: a refined, contemporary gallery that showed conceptual art by up-and-comers. Local art history was made there: The first meetings for what would become downtown’s monthly art walk were held at Radix. Until very recently, and despite the fact that the gallery closed in the early 1990s, its name remained on the structure’s façade.