An Arkansas mom was left speechless when a waiter at Olive Garden went above and beyond to help her family during a difficult time.
On July 21, Dallas French and her family stopped at the Olive Garden on North Rodney Parham Road in Little Rock after spending a difficult day at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. French’s 4-month-old daughter Ellee tested positive for E. coli earlier this month and needed to undergo another series of tests at the hospital.
Exhausted from the stress of her daughter’s illness, the mom was struggling to feed the baby and eat her own meal. That’s when a very special waiter stepped in to help. French shared her story and a sweet photo of the waiter with Ellee on Olive Garden’s Facebook page.
“[A]fter all that had happened that day, I was really out of it,” the mom wrote in the caption, adding that she hadn’t gotten much sleep over the past month. When the family arrived at Olive Garden, Ellee was hungry, so French tried to prepare a bottle for her, she explained. However, the mom spilled the bottle all over herself and the floor, so she prepared another one.
At that moment, their waiter offered to help. Having just brought salad and breadsticks to the table, he told French, “Here let me feed her and you eat,” the mom recalled.
“This melted all of us and this is what we need more of!” French wrote. “He fed her, I ate my salad and bread sticks and that milk on the floor got cleaned up after we left because he just understood! He didn’t even know what we had went through that day and showed us love and understanding ― not irritated that I had made a mess and my baby was screaming.”
“Gosh I wish I woulda got his name because he deserves the recognition!!” she added.
In just two days, the mom’s post received over 155,000 likes. Commenters identified the waiter in the photo as Robert Davis, and French subsequently friended him on Facebook.
French told The Huffington Post that she shared her post on Olive Garden’s Facebook page at the suggestion of friends. “Everything was such a blur that day, and I was so frazzled and mind-blocked,” she said, adding, “We just left a good tip and left, but I didn’t get to tell him how much I appreciated him doing that one act of kindness and that it changed my whole day and made what’s been going on this past month a lot lighter.”
French explained that Ellee had been sick since July 8. “She was diagnosed with a UTI and hydronephrosis (swelling of the kidney), so her kidney and tube to her urethra will be monitored,” the mom said, noting that doctors were optimistic she would recover with time.
Today, Ellee is doing very well. “You wouldn’t know anything was wrong with her now,” French said. “She is still getting back on her normal routine ― we are almost there!”
The mom hopes that the story of the waiter’s good deed will be a beacon of light in the midst of the negative events in the news lately. “I hope ... that everyone will see pure love between two strangers and that is what we need more of,” she said. French said she also wants others to be inspired to do good deeds and “just be respectful of one another and appreciate life.”
“We can accept the differences between us all and still show love!”
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