Second Chance

found online

We finally made it - Lori's favorite restaurant. We had made plans to go a dozen times over the past four years - each time the plans fell through... It's too far, it's too expensive, we don't have time... I had elaborate plans on our anniversary this past year that at the eleventh hour got sunk... and we didn't go...

But we finally made it on the way home from Lori's grandmother's funeral. Not the most auspicious of occasions, I'll admit, and it was a detour from going to Farmer's Inn with the girls (we didn't go there because of the rain...) and several literal detours later...we finally sat down.

It was just how I remembered it. Small town Italian restaurant, friendly enough staff, not-quite-ready-for-the-magazines decor... The physical menu had changed, but the contents didn't seem to have.

Didn't matter, we'd order the same thing. Could be gone twenty years and I'd order the same thing: spaghetti and meatballs. The BEST restaurant sauce anywhere, hands down. And Lori gets what she always gets, chicken parmigana.

Rachel orders meat ravioli and Elie gets spaghetti with sauce and meatball on the side. Please put the sauce and the meatball on the side, that's the only way she'll eat it.

Okay. The beverages come quickly. Rachel ordered wedding soup, Lori a salad. They were happy. The bread is good and the butter is, surprisingly, not frozen rock hard*.

Then the food comes. Oops, Elie's spaghetti has the sauce on it. Please take it back, she really won't eat it. We're not kidding. We tried to make that clear when we ordered.

Lori ended up with veal - which is perhaps the nastiest of the meats you can parmagiana** and I got a hair in my spaghetti. Sigh. Rachel, the one who absolutely didn't want to go to this restaurant, LOVED her food... Couldn't get refills, took forever to get Elie's food fixed...

So it was a disaster.

A COMPLETE failure.

A big, giant, mess.

So we did sent Elie's food back, we dealt with Lori's (she ate half, I choked down half - never again, though), we made it through the meal.

We left him an 18% tip.***

We will absolutely go back.

Everybody has bad days. Every kitchen, every waiter, every cook. Maybe it all happened at once. Maybe everybody was new. Maybe we got all the terrible employees at once, or all the hung over employees or who knows.

Everybody gets a second chance.

It's what we Christ followers call grace.

We treated the young man who waited on us with respect and courtesy even though he was ignoring us and doing a terrible job. Even though the food was wrong and we had reasons to complain. Even though others probably would have stormed out. They may not even know that most of those things were wrong. It's okay. We behaved as we should.

And we'll be back.

Because everyone deserves a second chance.











*Why do restaurants serve cold, hard butter pats? Did they not know we were coming? Surprise! Customers!!!
**Since, you know, eggplant is not a meat...
***Which is low by my standards, by the way, but he wouldn't know that.