When fires ravaged the West Coast in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, local restaurant owner Tom Kamis and his dedicated staff prepared hundreds of meals a day for displaced families. What started as Thanksgiving boxes turned into weeks of meeting the most immediate needs of so many families: food.
The Mission and Food for Lane County donated food to local restaurants to prepare and cook. Tom and almost 30 of his dedicated staff members volunteered to work for free with only the possibility of federal relief down the road.
During that terrifying time, they all wanted to help our most devastated neighbors, those who’d lost everything, even at their own expense. On one of their busiest days, they made and boxed about 300 meals.
“It was one of my best experiences in the restaurant industry,” Tom recalled recently. And he was quick to point out that Soriah’s Ib Hamide and Ambrosia’s Armen Kevrekian also committed their restaurants to the substantial effort.
For 16 beautiful years, The Davis offered a weekly home to the Eugene Metropolitan Rotary Club. Tom named his restaurant after a beloved local bartender died unexpectedly. That decision was just one of many in a long career dedicated to serving people.
Unlike most meeting spaces ideal for Rotary clubs, Tom never charged us a rental fee, never made us pay a flat fee for food, never restricted us to a heat-lamp buffet, or required RSVPs for a weekly headcount. He always consulted us on what configuration worked best for our meetings. He provided the A/V equipment we needed to host guest speakers, to share presentations, and to hear one another. That kind of extraordinary flexibility and accommodation is unheard of. And, of course, like any gifted restaurateur, his menus always offered excellent food, classic favorites, and custom drinks. For all the jokes Rotarians have to make about “rubber chicken lunches”, Metrotarians could always tell guests and prospective members to join us downtown for some of the best food and wine in Eugene, and mean it.
Tom catered multiple events for Eugene Metro over the years, including successful auctions. As a pillar of the community, he is exactly the kind of small business owner everyone loves to support. The restaurant’s prime location, the ambiance, and the quality of the dining experience always allowed us to enjoy great dinners together while we focused on service projects, grant proposals, inspiring speakers, fundraising, and fellowship. Tom helped make Metro a Rotary destination that even our friends on Zoom could enjoy virtually.
When we found out he was fighting a compounding series of medical crises, we were devastated to learn that one insurance company after another was denying him the treatment he needed in order to recover and the care he needed to stay healthy.
Running any business in downtown Eugene is challenging enough, between the difficult real estate market, increased crime, and folks suffering from untreated mental health issues. So when Tom could not access the significant medical care he needed, his well-run and long-successful business began to suffer. He fought hard for years, but the collision of these factors proved insurmountable, even for someone as talented, business-savvy, and industrious as Tom.
Now it’s our turn.
We have the opportunity to help our friend, if even just a fraction of how much he has helped us as a Rotary club, everything he’s enabled us to focus on by providing a meeting space that wasn’t just stable, it was an exceptional place to call Metro’s home since 2010.
We are just shy of our $20,000 goal to help him support his employees and mounting medical bills. Surprising absolutely no one, his priorities are in that order: his employees first, himself second.
We are thrilled to be so close to the finish line.
If you have ever enjoyed one of downtown’s best restaurants, or if you just want to support a community champion who always steps up for others, you can make a contribution here.
Thank you, fellow Rotarians, from all of us at Eugene Metro.
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