When Nebraskan mother of two Patty Simmons first spotted the Red Robin outside of her Fort Lauderdale hotel, she had certain expectations. “I’ll probably just get a burger,” she remembers saying out loud to her husband and children. “A turkey burger.” The family had woken up early in order to snag a good spot by the hotel pool, and, after three hours of denying her children’s requests to join them in the water, Patty was hungry.
“When the host sat us down, I remember he said, ‘Enjoy your meal!’” she tells us. “At the time, I had no idea just how much I would enjoy it.”
Patty opened the menu, and nearly gasped, realizing nearly everyting on the lunch menu was right up her alley.
“I could just eat anything on this menu,” Patty exclaimed, according to embarrassed underage witnesses.
Word began to spread through the restaurant that there was a woman present who could eat just about anything on the menu. Fellow patrons and Red Robin staff quickly began to gather around Patty’s table.
“Of course, we get customers who ask for our opinion when they’re torn between two, even three items.” says Chad, a waiter. “But when someone could just eat anything on the menu? That’s unheard of.”
After catching wind of the news, head Red Robin chef Spence Bolois prepared a little something special to help her choose. Small samples of each menu item began to stream out of the kitchen doors. Viewers marveled as Patty tasted and enjoyed the Clamdigger’s Clam Chowder and the Banzai Burger, along with every other dish on the menu.
“How are there so many items on this menu!?” one person yelled. Some even posed for selfies as Patty sampled in the background, just to document that they were in the presence of a person that could just eat anything listed on a menu. But no one was more impressed than Patty’s husband, Roger.
“Normally Patty likes what she likes and sticks to it,” Mr. Simmons says, watching his wife shovel four kinds of sample-sized sliders into her mouth with the glowing expression of a newlywed. “She is just full of surprises. This is the kind of thing that reminds me why I married her in the first place.”
Close to an hour later, it was time for the big decision. All eyes were on Patty. When she finally opened her mouth, all went silent.
“I think I’ll have…the chicken Caesar wrap!” she cried.
All was silent; then, an eruption of applause. One man even turned to his father and said, “I’m sorry.”
Patty ate her Caesar wrap with gusto. She adored it so much so that she claimed she could “just about eat another one!”
