Help-yourself bookshelves with appealing titles–Fail Safe, My Mother Was a Neanderthal, The Flying Hockey Stick, Black Cherry Blues–are appreciated anytime. Vegetable and herb gardens outside a restaurant are legit. But how rational are a fireplace and decorated Christmas tree in midsummer?
“The fireplace is there year-round,” explains Rob TerBush, owner-manager of Holiday’s Restaurant on W. Stadium. “And that’s our Holiday’s tree, and we decorate it for each holiday–Mother’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Valentine’s Day. We had a flag and red-white-and-blue ribbon on it for Memorial Day.” He asks rhetorically, “Where can you have a fireplace and a holiday tree year-round?” then answers himself: “Holiday’s, where every day’s a celebration.”
TerBush started planting the restaurant’s gardens nine years ago. “Cucumbers, eggplants, banana peppers, jalapenos, bell peppers, Juliet and Roma tomatoes, herbs, basil, cilantro, thyme, mint–everything is used here [on] BLTs, salads, fajita vegetables, eggplant parmesan on Friday nights once the eggplants start coming in, fettuccine Alfredo.” Some customers even walk in carrying something they’ve just picked, asking to have it in their omelet or sandwich.
TerBush says restless kids inspired the books soon after they opened twenty-two years ago. “We had crayons and coloring books, but sometimes kids would get bored with that, so we added a stack of books that they could read or flip through.” Grownups got their chance more recently, when some customers began leaving books, and others began taking them home.
“Typically, people bring in three or four books and then take one or two,” TerBush says. “And yet, to our surprise, the more stacked it is, the more people feel comfortable thinking, ‘Oh, I could take a couple of these and not leave it bare.’ It doesn’t take too long to clear those out.”
TerBush favors mysteries and suspense novels himself, but running the restaurant doesn’t leave him with a lot of spare time–he says his only chance to read is “right before my eyes close.”
