The Angel at the Next Table

This is not a restaurant review. This is the tale of a hometown adventure.

My husband and I decided to try Sonoma's in Owen Brown last night. We had just enough time to have dinner before picking up our daughter from her youth group activity at the Interfaith Center. We had never eaten there, but it seemed like a no-brainer. It's right across the parking lot from OBIC.

First impressions--it's one enormous room with an excess of tevevisions. And then, the realization: we have stumbled on to the Sunday football crowd. The televisions were loud, the patrons were pleasantly boisterous. We took a table and looked around for a waitress.

There wasn't one. Well, actually, there was one waitress for the entire place and she was also tending bar. She was very friendly under the circumstances. She took our order promptly, got our drinks, and then...

We waited. And waited. And we began to worry that we wouldn't be finished in time to get our daughter. Our phones weren't picking up a signal for some reason so we couldn't text her.

I began to think that our waitress/bartender was also the cook.

My husband made an executive decision to pop over to touch base with our daughter. Almost as soon as he left, our food appeared. As I looked up to say thanks I noticed that the server wasn't our waitress but some nice woman from the table next to ours.

"I used to work here," she explained. "I'm just trying to help out."

My husband came back, we ate, asked for the check. As we finished, the mysterious woman from the next table appeared once more.

"Don't write off this place because of tonight. She's really short-handed. I worked here for years. It's really a wonderful place."

We heard her go to the waitress and say, "Take one of their sandwiches off their check and put it on my bill."

Wow. That's loyalty.

Hats off to that poor woman who was running an entire restaurant by herself yesterday. And, to the angel at the next table, thanks. We'll come back again and give Sonoma's another chance.

Maybe not during Sunday football, though.