Long pay-it-forward train astounds restaurant waitress

A rare act of kindness at a diner in Webster is the type of story that restores one's faith in humanity.

Last Saturday, the day after Christmas, Patricia Rabetoy was working her waitress job at Maa's Diner on Empire Boulevard. Her shift started at 7:30 a.m. with a mother and daughter eating breakfast. While they were eating, an unknown man walked to the cash register and paid for the mother and daughter's meal.

Moments went by and the mother went to the register to pay the bill. That's when Rabetoy had to break the news.

"Ma'am, an anonymous person has paid for your breakfast," Rabetoy said.

"Oh my God, that's so awesome," the mother said. "Well, I think I need to do the same."

The mother picked another person in the restaurant and paid for their breakfast. As this was happening, Rabetoy thought, "Wow, well wasn't that nice."

Suddenly, the kindness rippled through the restaurant. Customers paid someone else's bills for Rabetoy's entire work shift, which ended at 1:15 p.m. By the time Rabetoy's colleague Ashlee Grann totaled the money, the customers had executed a random pay-it-forward scheme 23 times in a row.

"Pretty much everyone that came in participated in this willingly," said Rabetoy, a 40-year waitress who said she has never seen this level of generosity.

The mother and daughter who had their breakfast paid for were Danielle Short of Webster and her 8-year-old daughter, Gianna. They woke up that morning and decided to go eat at Maa's because Danielle's fiancé was busy at work.

They walked in and had bacon, eggs and hash browns. When they finished, Rabetoy placed their bill on the table. The waitress walked away and then quickly returned.

"She came over and grabbed my check and I thought there was something wrong with it," Danielle Short said. "I thought she was going off to fix it."

Once Danielle realized someone had paid for her meal, she looked around the restaurant, spotted "a cute little old couple" and paid for their food.

Danielle said she figured, "We were already gonna pay for ours, so why not pay for someone else's."

Danielle didn't see the man who paid for her meal and didn't even have a chance to see her bill. She walked out of the restaurant having no idea the pay-it-forward train would grow so large.

Grann has been a waitress at Maa's since it opened two years ago. She said it's not unusual for others to pay for someone's meal. Sometimes it happens on Friday nights when a customer sees another family at a table with small kids. And pay-it-forward rounds have been reported at other Rochester-area restaurants before, occasionally at drive-through windows and elsewhere.

What made Saturday so spectacular, Grann said, was that customers randomly picked out tables to pay for, no matter how many people had a meal.

"Two-person tables were paying for four-person tables," said Grann, adding that some of the bills were as low as $7 but others were as high as $50. "I was not expecting it to go up that high. They didn't care how much it was. They weren't even asking."

As customers continued paying for each other's meals, Rabetoy told Grann the situation. Some of those involved were Maa's regulars, and others were new to the restaurant. Some of the customers paying it forward were seated at Grann's tables and they decided they didn't want the next table knowing that their meal had been paid for. And so, Rabetoy came up with the idea of saying "a secret Santa has paid for your meal."

"I thought that was a cuter way of saying it instead of 'These random people paid for your food.' " Grann said.

Paying it forward is the catch-all term that society has adopted to describe when a series of strangers foot the bill for each other, sometimes planned or sometimes anonymously. There's even a day of the year dedicated to the act. The cases have appeared mostly at restaurants, but there have been cases of pay-it-forward airplane flights and pay-it-forward kidney transplants at Loyola University. In Florida, a series of customers paid for each other's Starbucks coffee for 11 straight hours.

While the Maa's Diner act didn't last that long, people around town thought the feat was special all the same.

Rabetoy finished her shift that afternoon and decided to share the tale on Facebook. On the Webster, NY Facebook page, Rabetoy's tale has garnered more than 2,500 Likes. In their own way, Facebook users commented that the 23 chain was amazing and the tale proves that random generosity is not dead.

"There are a lot of good people here in Webster," one Facebook user said.

"That is so nice to hear and a wonderful thing to do for someone," another user wrote. "It is really awesome to hear it continued through the whole day. Thanks for sharing a positive story in this world where all we seem to hear is negative."

KJBROOKS@Gannett.com