Roughly 5 months ago, I was attempting to make a quick exit from the parking lot behind Itsy-Prints, Tom's, and St. Joe Democratic Headquarters. I was leaving 10 minutes late for an event that I was already 20 minutes late to. I jumped in my car, frantically grabbed at my seat belt, put my car in reverse, and of course...backed into a car parked behind me.
It gets worse.
It would be one thing if this car belonged to an employee of the printing shop, a patron of Tom's, or even some influential political operative stopping into the Democratic HQ.....but no, I had instead damaged the property of arguably the most powerful person on that block....the cook at Tom's.
Suddenly that event that I was increasingly late for mattered very little, because the future of my over-easy eggs and hash browns was in peril. Tom's is one of downtown's classic cozy small town dinners. It's the breakfast place for those who spend considerable time in the immediate area - which includes some of our city's more significant and prominent offices: the County-City Building, the new WNIT building, St. Joe Democratic HQ, the Trigon Building, or the South Bend Building Department office a couple doors down. It's nothing too fancy, but it's comfortable and convenient...so I clearly wasn't ready to lose my breakfast place because of my idiotic driving.
Location: 131 South Lafayette Boulevard, South Bend, IN Hours: very early until 2 pm 7 days a week
Phone: (574) 237-9401
Tip: Well... for starters, try not to crash your car into anything, namely cars belonging to the people who make your food, which creates a new saying from an old familiar one. Don't crash your car where you eat.
Thankfully, that cook is as forgiving as her food is good, so I didn't need to worry about shards of my tail light finding their way into my scrambled eggs. Maybe it helped that I tipped like a Rockefeller for about a month afterward...