Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Teacher Gifts

Today is the last day of school before the Winter Break. It’s a good time to remember the far-reaching nature of our public school system. You may not have children. You may have sent your children to independent schools. It matters not. You will be impacted one way or another. Yesterday I read a long thread on Facebook about several waves of illness in the schools right now. There’s influenza A and norovirus, I believe. And of course there’s COVID. Apparently in some individual schools the rate of illness is high enough for school admin to notify parents.  When I was little the acceptable holiday gift for a teacher was one of those lovely floral handkerchief squares. (I don’t know what it was for male teachers. They were rare in my elementary years.) These days the range of teacher gifts is wider and I have fond memories of Target gift cards which I have written about before. I think it’s safe to say that giving one’s teacher Influenza, norovirus, or COVID is not the ideal holiday...

They Can Wait

This is not a typical Saturday post. That’s because, in my community, it’s not a typical Saturday.  Oakland Mills High School, after years of deferred repair, needs massive renovation. It’s pretty simple: when you don’t fix a problem it gets bigger. The school system itself said the the OMHS school building was  "no longer conducive to learning" back in 2018.  2018 .  But Thursday the Boad of Education voted to push it out of the lineup of important projects which will be given the go-ahead to proceed soonest.  In my opinion it’s a terrible decision and sets a dangerous precedent. To explain, here’s the advocacy letter I sent in support of Oakland Mills High School. I was rather proud of it. I am writing to ask you to proceed with needed renovation at Oakland Mills High School in the most timely and comprehensive manner humanly possible. I have read the letter sent to you by the Oakland Mills Community Association and I am in complete agreement. You are extremel...

Columbia Chance Connection

  Last night, as my husband and I were about to sit down to dinner, our front door swung open and a cheery voice announced, “I’m ba—ack!”  We weren’t expecting anyone. Clearly the only people who’d walk right in to our house would be one of our offspring. I had my reading glasses on so I wasn’t seeing too clearly. It seemed too tall for our youngest, but we knew our eldest was at work. I took off my glasses to see a friendly but confused face scanning our living room. When her gaze landed on us we all had a sudden realization. We didn’t know eachother. “Oh I’m so sorry! I’m in the wrong house! My daughter just moved in and she needed hooks for the kitchen so I ran out to get them.” She waved the package. “All these houses look the same and I don’t know the neighborhood yet. I thought this was my daughter’s house.” We were all getting a bit giggly. “That’s okay. For a quick second we thought you were our daughter,” said my husband. I told her our names and said she should defin...