It's Official: Gardenia is Closed

It all started before Thanksgiving when it was Amanda's last week in the Harrisburg Office. We asked her where she wanted to go for her special goodbye lunch and she picked Gardenia...of course. We drove over to Gardenia and found that it was closed. Hmmm...strange. Oh well, maybe the owner's are on vacation for Thanksgiving and had to close it. The next day there was a locksmith van and a piece of poster board with "CLOSED" written in sharpie in the window. That's not a good sign. Today when I drove to work there was a big dumpster outside and the chairs from the restaurant sticking out. ::sob sob::

Sure Gardenia was kinda a dive. Sure your waitress always looked like a crack whore (or is that un-pc should it be narcotics prostitute). Sure sometimes they forgot to bring your coleslaw. Sure the list of specials was sometimes misspelled (I love stir fry on a bed of white race). Sure it was the type of place that may show up on the news for having been the scene of a horrific shooting or stabbing. But we loved it!! It had good cheap food, rice pudding that was the bomb, and was close enough that we could fool ourselves into thinking we might be able to fit in lunch there during our half hour lunch break. I'll miss it. I'm just sorry I didn't get to say goodbye and have to explain why I didn't want apple butter on my cottage cheese one last time. Man, I'll miss the rice pudding.