The Curious Tale of the Restaurant Next Door

The Marigold restaurant recently closed its doors after fifty years of being our neighbour. It was bittersweet news as it's hard to see iconic businesses and institutions close, but on the other hand, to be honest, I was never really very fond of their style of North American Chinese food, with its dayglow pink sauces and its anatomically improbable chicken balls. Moreover, their Friday lunch buffet often caused problems as large van-loads of Marigold enthusiasts from the country, in town for a day of shopping, would clog our parking lot, either in defiance or in ignorance of our signs.

But maybe our signs needed to be larger because whenever I think of the Marigold restaurant I think of one incident in particular. This might have been fifteen years ago or so and it was a Friday in the summer. It was a reasonably busy day at the clinic when a nervous-looking looking middle-aged couple came in through the back door. The clinic is relatively long and narrow, with the parking lot out back and the front facing a busy street, so it was not unusual for people to try to come in that way. We generally keep the back door locked though because it can be crowded and chaotic in that part of the clinic and it's not really meant for through-traffic, but sometimes we forget. That day we forgot.

The couple walked slowly past the grooming area, and past the kennel areas full of dogs and cats, and through the treatment room with staff in scrubs scuttling about and pets on stainless steel tables and various machines going "ping". They walked past all of this and made their way to the reception counter at the front of the clinic. There they stopped and the man smiled shyly at the receptionist, cleared his throat and quietly asked a question. He asked, "Is this the Marigold restaurant?"

I'll let that sink in for a moment.

"Is this the Marigold restaurant?"

The most astonishing part isn't that they would walk into Birchwood thinking it was the Marigold. The back of the clinic and the back of the restaurant look pretty similar I suppose. And sometimes your brain just blanks out signs. I get that. It's probably happened a few times before and people just giggled at their error and made a quick about-face.

And the most astonishing part isn't even that after seeing everything they just saw, and hearing everything they just heard, and smelling everything they just smelled, that they would think that this could possibly somehow still be a restaurant. That's really astonishing, but it is not, in fact, the most astonishing part. These looked like trusting, innocent and, dare I say it, unsophisticated folk.

No, the most astonishing part is that after everything they saw, heard and smelled they were still hungry and apparently still interested enough to ask that question!

The Marigold is being replaced by a funeral home, so the parking will only get worse. And I sincerely hope that it doesn't generate any funny stories.