In addition to their normal business of serving breakfast and lunch — including their famous 101 omelets — the staff of The Coffee Pot Restaurant is also getting ready to serve 700 or more people a free turkey dinner with all the trimmings on Tuesday, Nov. 26.
In what has become an annual Sedona tradition now in its 10th year [11th, counting the inaugural year when it served the dinner before Christmas], Coffee Pot will rearrange its tables into community style seating, and feed all comers a free Thanksgiving-style meal along with beverages including coffee, tea and soda.
“It’s getting bigger and bigger every year,” manager Damian Daher said. “Hopefully it will be even bigger this year.”
According to Daher and past attendees, the annual dinner is a fun and festive community gathering representing the full spectrum of Sedona’s residents and visitors.
“We’re really just wanting to bring the community together and people from all walks of life in the community,” he said.
Daher said Coffee Pot has no problem serving so many people a free turkey dinner.
“We’ve got a pretty good system down,” he said. “We have [the restaurant] open from 3 to 6 p.m. People start lining up out the door before 3. We open the doors and we fill the restaurant, and once people start leaving we seat new people, and we start running a little bit of a list. There might be groups of two, four, eight — different sizes — and we slot them in whenever spaces open up. Everyone is served the same thing so there’s no ordering. It’s just a traditional turkey dinner, unless someone has some sort of dietary request that we try to accommodate.”
Some accompaniments, like pumpkin pie, are passed around separately from the main plate, and Daher said they try to accommodate simple requests like holding the gravy or cranberry sauce if you don’t want it on your plate.
Daher said the free dinner started out as a way to feed the needy in the community or people who didn’t have anyone to spend the holidays with. But during the first few years, the meal evolved into a community event.
“It’s really a nice way for different people to be able to mingle and get to know one another,” Daher added. “We’ve even had people come in over the years and say that they’ve met people at the dinner that they ended up becoming friends with. People just have really fond memories of their experiences that they’ve had here at the dinner throughout the years. It’s really fun to be able to just see all different types of community members, even some tourists, together.”
The meal is free, but diners can leave donations, 100% of which goes to the Sedona Community Food Bank.
“All of our staff is donating their time,” Daher said. “We usually have several servers, several bussers, heavy on the kitchen staff, and then we usually get some community members, often times they’re children of some of our staff members that come and help out, so we always have lots of different hands helping out in different capacities, serving the food, or just passing out the different accompaniments.”
