Restaurant Owner Gives Thanks by Giving Meals

The menu at Tom’s No. 12 is a compendium of fast-food possibilities: hamburgers, burritos, cheese omelets, chicken-fried steaks and beef kebabs, to name a few.

But once a year, owner Damianos (Danny) Stefanidis closes the drive-through window and the cash register and stops making pastrami sandwiches, zucchini fries and all his regular fare in order to prepare a feast: turkey with corn bread stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, vegetables and pie.

He then invites everyone in need of a Thanksgiving dinner to crowd into his restaurant, sit down at his 25 booths and tables and enjoy a banquet--on the house.

Stefanidis said he serves free turkey dinners to show appreciation for the blessings he has received since coming to the United States from Greece 16 years ago.”

“I’m not a rich man,” Stefanidis said, but at age 37, “I’ve done all right.” He owns a successful business--a unit in a restaurant chain founded by a cousin--and he has a wife and three children.

His Thanksgiving Day gift to the community began modestly five years ago. He put a sign in his window offering free turkey dinners to senior citizens on Thanksgiving Day. But hardly anyone came.

“We had maybe 15 to 20 people,” he said. “A lot of people didn’t know about it.”

He ended up coaxing pedestrians off the street to eat the food he had prepared.

The next year, Stefanidis said, he decided to offer a free dinner to anyone who wanted it and publicized the event through the local newspaper. About 400 to 500 people showed up. Each year since then, the number of people crowding into Tom’s No. 12 on Mission Boulevard has grown, and Stefanidis is planning to feed 1,800 between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. today.

Stefanidis pays for the food, but he has the help of numerous volunteers in preparing and serving the meal, including the Rev. C. L. Brown and members of the Greater Goodwill Church of God in Christ, located a block from the restaurant.

Stefanidis and Anna Love, who runs the church’s outreach program, said volunteers planned to cook more than 75 turkeys. Nearly all the turkeys were to be cooked in home ovens because the restaurant doesn’t have facilities to handle the load. Last year, Love said, she prepared five 10-gallon barrels of corn bread dressing from scratch for the feast. The pies, too, she said, are always homemade.

Love said the project has become a community event drawing city officials, judges, doctors and others as volunteer servers. Those who come to eat dinner, she said, range from lonely people with no place to go on Thanksgiving Day to large families on a tight budget.

Although several Pomona church groups help the needy at Thanksgiving with free food, the effort at Tom’s No. 12 is unusual because of the fast-food setting and the owner’s commitment. “Working with him has been a blessing,” Love said.

Stefanidis won’t say how much the free dinners cost him.

“I’m going to ask you to leave that to myself,” he said.

His reward comes in watching people enjoy Thanksgiving dinner in his restaurant.

“You see people with a lot of kids,” he said. “They’re not homeless, but they can’t afford a big dinner. They come here. . . . We give some balloons to the kids. It makes you feel good.

“You ask how much it costs. It really costs nothing. When these people look at you with love and you see you’re making these people happy, it costs nothing.”