Restaurant chain first in line for kindness

Hospitality lifer Ken Pendery recalls vividly the time when he was proudly wearing a new shirt and tie, and a waitress in a fancy Cincinnati restaurant accidentally spilled red wine on him.

It wasn’t the spill that irked Pendery. It was management. They nonchalantly told him he could get the shirt dry-cleaned then come back with the receipt, and they will cut him a check. “That’s really inconvenient,” says Pendery, a Cincinnati-area native, of the mid-1990s incident. “I didn’t want to have to come back there with the receipt.”