Today started, how do I put this nicely, tragically.
With my sister in town visiting, a friend and I headed down to Granville Island to meet her for brunch. Little did we realize that our day was about to get really, really long.
Crowded with onlookers, firetrucks, police cars, ambulances and police tape, the entrance to Granville Island today was a crime scene. As it turns out, a short time before we got there, two (or potentially three, don’t know for sure at this point) people decided to jump off the Granville Street bridge onto the seawall below!
The seawall that I run on, kids play across the duck pond from, and the patio of the Cat’s Meow (where brunch was) looks out on. It was horrific and sad. I don’t know all of the details, but I did overhear some of the crowd saying things like ‘he was only 29′….’loved skydiving’….’they were so beautiful’. My thoughts are with the families of those involved.
With that in our head, it was tough to get on with the day (as I’m sure you can imagine how not pretty the whole scene was); however, life has to go on. And on this nuclear hot day in Vancouver, it did.
Getting back to the subject of this post, we didn’t ‘brunch’ at the Granville Island Hotel (don’t you love it when people use words like ‘brunch’ or ’summer/winter’ as verbs?) as our would-have-been server was quick to point out that they no longer were serving brunch (his name was/is Laurie). Where the Granville Island Hotel gets extra points is that Laurie went above and beyond the call to ensure we received great service despite the fact that we were going to move along to a restaurant that did serve brunch. How did he do that?
Here’s how:
1) he made three recommendations of other restaurants at Granville Island that were still serving brunch;
2) he gave us a summary of some of the items that each of them served; and, my favourite
3) he caught up with us outside of the hotel to tell us that the Cat’s Meow was the best place to go and that he felt it probably would fit our needs the best.
Determined?
Honest?
Customer first (despite the fact that it’s not even your customer)?
Yeah.
Will I be coming back? Absolutely…just not for brunch.
Thanks, Laurie!
darren
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