Sistah Pat

The Egg Roll Machine and Cafe Mimosa burned down yesterday.  Ti Lee came to this country back during the Vietnam era.  He opened a little restaurant called The Egg Roll Machine and sold really yummy chinese food.  After several years, he bought another restaurant closer to downtown and combined The Egg Roll Machine and Cafe Mimosa. Although housed in the same building, The Egg Roll Machine remained a casual little restaurant featuring fast and friendly asian cuisine and Cafe Mimosa became a more upscale establishment featuring Vietnamese food.  Later, Ti Lee bought Lentini’s, a well-established Italian restaurant when Mr. Lentini retired.  DS, had been the head chef at Lentini’s for several years and Ti Lee wanted to turn the restaurant into an International dining experience featuring Vietnamese, Chinese, Italian, and American cuisine.  He didn’t count on the expectations of established Lentini’s customers who took it as an affront.  The concept of an international dining experience never quite caught on and Ti Lee sold the restaurant after just a couple of years.  Still, during the time he owned it, he and DS became quite close.  He always held DS and the rest of us, as his family, in high regard.  When my father died, Ti Lee sent enough food to my house to feed an army.  He sold Lentini’s with a stipulation in the contract that DS remain the head chef for the new owners.  A good man.  A good friend to have.  DS never quite got along with the idiots who bought out Lentini’s and ran it into the ground until they declared bankruptcy but he and Ti Lee remain close to this day. 

Ti Lee lives just a mile from us in the same development and he built a very large koi pond off the front of his home.  It’s lovely to drive by his house and see the landscaping and waterfall around the pond.  When my koi all died from chlorine poisoning a couple of years ago, he offered me more.  I never quite got over all my fish dying and I’ve chosen to just leave the pond as a pond since then but Ti Lee sends me an offer, every 6 months or so, to go out to some property he owns in Indiana with a huge pond and restock my koi.  He says it would give him great pleasure if I would accept his offer.  I drove past his house on the way home from work yesterday and was shocked to see that the brick retaining wall on his koi pond must have cracked from the cold and his entire front yard and the street in front of his house were a solid sheet of ice where the water had run out.  I hoped he was home when it happened and was able to save his fish.  Sad.

I got home and DH told me he’d heard on the news that Cafe Mimosa had burned to the ground in the pre-dawn hours and that the entire road was blocked in the area around the restaurant.  I was shocked, to say the least, and watched it on the news.  The restaurant is a total loss.  There is nothing left and it hurt to look at the pictures on the news.  A contrast of blackened and charred devastation standing out against the stark white ice covering the trees and adjacent buildings.  It hurts to even look at it.  I called DS and told him and he said he was going to try to go by Ti Lee’s house last night but I don’t know if he did.  Yesterday was a very bad day for Ti Lee.