Restaurant anniversary.

So, the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now celebrated its 21st anniversary pretty recently, and the owners got a couple of fancy cakes from a local bakery saying stuff like "Happy Anniversary [restaurant's name]!".

Then, they brought them out for themselves on that very night of the anniversary and blew the candles out, and they gave away all of the cake to staff.

("You should have bought the restaurant a Singha," I was like.)

And, while that was happening, one (young) (white) (female) local stopped by with her boyfriend to pick up their takeout, and it not only turned out to be her birthday, but she was exactly the same age as the restaurant, too, and so the owners gave her a piece of cake and bundled it up and sent her out with it along with her takeout order.

For a while after that, too, they had an elegant white-covered photo-insert anniversary book out on a side-table when you walked in alongside a waterglass full of multicolored Sharpies, so that customers could sign the book with congratulations and memories and whatnot, the photo insert place on the book-cover being the same collage of the restaurant's name and pictures of (Thai) food like appears on all of the menus that we have.

(I think they just cut that picture out of a spare take-out menu, and slipped it inside the plastic sleeve inside the cover.)

And, anyways, what people did with that book was fairly interesting.

Like, some people drew pictures like of a Thai iced tea, and others shared how much they liked the food, and one woman even wrote down that she found out that she was a grandmother at the restaurant, even writing in the specific date that she got that good news.

(I was there when she signed...  She said that she knew her daughter-in-law was pregnant, and she was dining in with her parents when her son called her up to let her know that his wife had given birth. So, she not only found out that she was a grandma at the restaurant, but her parents found out that they were great-grandparents, too... She left that last part out of the book, though.)

Also, given that I recently found out that a cult-leader of a decently well-known cult used to live in the area within the twenty-one year period when the restaurant's been open, that got me wondering if they had ever actually stepped foot inside the restaurant and eaten there.

Like, I mean, once you know those two things, you have to wonder. That too could be a part of the restaurant's history.