Avenues Bistro Survives Car Crash!
Dana Self, art critic for The Pitch and director of marketing for the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory, was eating lunch with a friend at Avenues Bistro in Brookside today. Shortly after her blackened grouper salad arrived (“They say it’s blackened grouper, but it’s really just grilled,” Self says), the sound of shattering glass silenced conversations and the restaurant literally vibrated.
“My first thought was that the shelves had fallen in the bar,” Self reports. “But there was a sound of a car, like in a movie. Almost everyone in the dining room edged up to the front of the restaurant to see what happened.”
What happened was an elderly driver had hit the gas pedal instead of the brake in the restaurant’s parking lot and gone through one of the plate glass windows at the front of the restaurant.
“And I mean went through,” Self says. “The entire front end of the car, right up to the windshield, was in the bar. No one was hurt, though. It’s a Christmas miracle.”
A couple hours later, waitress Brenda Smith called in to find out what time she needed to be at Avenues for her dinner shift. “Hey, you missed all the excitement today,” the bartender told her.
“Can you believe it?” Smith tells me. “And the restaurant’s still open for dinner tonight!”
“That’s right,” Jeff the bartender confirm. “They’re boarding up the window right now.”
No one seems to know if the driver of the vehicle stayed for lunch, but I’ll bet she had lost her appetite. — Charles Ferruzza
