Currently on a business trip to Silicon Valley, California, I heard a restaurant in Mountain View had a sign in its window promising a free meal on Thanksgiving. So, naturally, that is where I turned up, yesterday.
Outside, under a red awning, the line was four or five people deep and extended well beyond the restaurant’s facade to about three shops down. The well-dressed and the shabbily-attired stood side by side, and a few sat in wheelchairs, chatting away as they awaited their turn to feast on the complimentary turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes.
Inside the packed restaurant, I found the owner jovially working the room, shaking hands with diners, delivering glasses of milk or water, sweeping up whatever spilled on the floor, and generally basking in the moment.
“I am very fortunate that I could provide this for the community,” he said.
As a restaurant worker in Chicago in the 1980s, John Akkaya dreamed of having his own business, and was impressed by his employer’s tradition of providing free meals on Thanksgiving.
“I promised myself if one day I own a restaurant, I would do same thing,” the Turkish immigrant explained. “And the first year I owned a restaurant I start doing it.”
Now the proprietor of not one, but two popular Italian establishments in California, Akkaya has been treating 1,000 to 1,500 people to a free Thanksgiving meal every year for the past two decades.
“New wife, new baby, new restaurant, it all happen in one year and, God bless, I am still in the business,” Akkaya said.
He established the tradition at Cafe Figaro in Burlingame and then shifted it some seven years later to his second restaurant, Ristorante Don Giovanni in Mountain View.
Akkaya told me he has been guided by two principles which have allowed him to prosper in the United States.
“We all have to learn to share what we have. And what we don’t have, we have to learn to work for it,” he said. “That is the way I look at life. I work very hard and, same time, I share. I don’t share maybe enough, but I try to share as much as I can.”
I will do little acts of kindness for others…. I know the love and joy will come back to me.