Spring and fall have always felt a little bittersweet to me.
Part of it is simple enough: they’re beautiful seasons. But beauty is only half of it. They are also seasons of transition, and transition — even the good kind — carries a little ache with it.
I used to love the beginning of the school year. New notebooks, new teachers, the sense that something was about to happen. Fall carried possibility. Spring, on the other hand, carried freedom, sunlight, and the approach of summer — but also the realization that things were changing. Friends moved on. People graduated. Certain routines and familiar faces quietly disappeared from your daily life.
I suppose that strange mixture of anticipation and regret is just part of growing up. Part of being human, really. We are always arriving somewhere while leaving something else behind.
The restaurant business understands this better than most.
Restaurants are transitional places by nature. People come into them for a season of life — between classes, between careers, while figuring things out, while building toward whatever comes next. The lucky thing, for us, is that so many remarkable people have passed through our doors over the years.
And they leave marks behind.
A phrase that becomes part of the culture. A dish made just right. A friendship. A habit. A laugh from the kitchen. A favorite server whose section people quietly request every time they come in.
At Tomato Head, we’ve been especially fortunate. People tend to stay with us longer than the industry average, which means our staff becomes part of the fabric of the place — and part of our lives. So much of human connection happens around food, and when you spend years making and serving meals together, those relationships matter.
This graduation season, between our two stores, we have around thirty staff members moving on to the next chapters of their lives.
Thirty.
That’s extraordinary. And yes, if we’re honest, it’s a little emotional too.
We’ll miss them. Deeply.