FREE LUNCH : Restaurant Salutes the Laboring Peace Officer

Restaurateur Paul Burns hasn’t forgotten his earlier life.

Back in the days when Burns was a sheriff’s deputy, he recalls, there was never anywhere for a patrolling cop to get a decent lunch on a holiday.

So on Labor Day--as a way of saluting the men and women he still considers colleagues--it’s lunch on the house at Geppetto’s Italian Family Restaurant, Burns’ place in Thousand Oaks.

Whether pizza or pasta, the complimentary fare makes chopped liver of the notion that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. At Geppetto’s, that’s the whole point of opening on Labor Day.

“It’s just our way of saying thanks to all the guys,” said Burns, a retired Ventura County sheriff’s deputy who for eight years has been feeding deputies, police and Highway Patrol officers, firefighters and paramedics assigned to work on Labor Day.

“Everybody’s out having fun and partying, and there’s no place to go eat, so I figured I’d open up my restaurant,” Burns said. “It gives them a place to go.”

Spago it isn’t. Geppetto’s serves its meals on paper place mats, its cola by the pitcher and its brownies homemade. Salad still means iceberg lettuce, not arugula.

But Burns’ restaurant was the place to be Monday for one peace officer after another, who stopped by for a break from the beat.

By 1:30 p.m., many hours and several wild-goose chases since the day shift began at 7:45 a.m., 36 officers had hitched a ride on Geppetto’s gravy train and manager Paula Farhat was gearing up for supper. An experienced Labor Day hostess, Farhat estimated that the annual free lunch costs the restaurant on Thousand Oaks Boulevard “$500 to $750, depending on whether there are fires that year.

“Last year, there were a lot of fires going on so we had no firemen; they couldn’t take advantage of it,” she said.

She knows fire activity was lower this year “because a little while ago the whole front of the restaurant was filled with police cars and two fire trucks. I’m sure everybody thought we were being robbed.”

Between lunch and dinner, the spotless restaurant hosted a few lingering uniforms, empty plates and the crackling of two-way radios. At a window table for four, Ventura County Sheriff’s Deputies Bill Grund, Barbara Anderson, Lance Brooks and Greg Wilson chewed over a day filled with alcohol-related traffic accidents and domestic disputes.

“Families being together three days and not being able to handle it,” Grund said philosophically.

That theory seemed borne out at a table occupied by Deputies Mark Bailey, Mark Briggs and Jim Winstead, who told of a 63-year-old Agoura Hills woman who was hospitalized Monday for depression after her son wrested a knife away from her, slashing his hand.

But the problems of the policeman’s lot aside, the consensus among Bailey, Briggs and Winstead seemed to be that the relative quiet and holiday pay--time and a half--made the shift tolerable, not to mention another bonus that suddenly occurred to Bailey.

“Did you come in for the job, Briggs?” he asked, turning to his colleague. “I just came in for the lunch.”