The Midnight Stand-Off at the Grand Restaurant
A breakfast patron turns into a bandit, but gets more than he bargained for from the night cook's poker.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
After partaking of a 5-cent breakfast in the Grand restaurant at 4 o'clock this morning, a stranger attempted to hold up T. Hirata, the Japanese waiter of the place, and was finally driven out by P. Kawato, the night cook, who dashed at the man with a heavy poker in his hands. After the would-be robber had been driven into the street, he kicked a large hole in the plate glass show window of the restaurant, seemingly for spite. After finishing his meal, the stranger swaggered up to the waiter and pulled a shining dirk from his pocket, exclaiming, 'Just hand over the money in that drawer, now, and be quick about it. I haven't any time to lose, see? If you don't come through I'll stick you through the gizzard, you little shrimp.' Terrorized, the Japanese lad darted from behind the counter and ran toward the kitchen, the stranger following with upraised knife. Hirata, the cook, hearing the noise, seized the poker and made for the front of the place, meeting the onrushing couple at the doors to the kitchen. He made a pass at the bandit's head and the man shrank back. When the cook advanced, the robber ran to the front of the restaurant and slipped through the door. It was in the Grand restaurant that a Japanese cook was murdered in cold blood several months ago.
“If you don't come through I'll stick you through the gizzard, you little shrimp.”
This incident occurred in the volatile atmosphere of early 20th-century Tacoma, where anti-immigrant sentiment and labor tensions were high. The brief mention of a previous murder at the same location hints at the recurring, often violent, precarity faced by immigrant workers in the city’s restaurant industry during this era.
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