A casual dining chain’s staff went above and beyond for a family mourning the loss of a beloved pet.
On Aug. 10, Cousin Homer, a musician and TikToker who lives in Saint Joseph, Missouri, posted a video about the last day of Bella, his family’s 13-year-old black Labrador retriever, which has touched hearts around the world.
“I’m standing here in front of Cheddar’s restaurant and I’m going to tell the whole world what you did,” Homer says in the video. “Not long ago, I had to put my best friend of 13 years to sleep, and I miss her terribly.”
Homer explains he wanted his dog’s last meal to be a special one, so he contacted Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen and asked them for “the biggest steak they had.”
When the worker asked him which two sides he’d like with the order, he said he didn’t need any, explaining that he was having his dog put down, and he wanted her last meal to be a “nice, juicy steak.”
The worker told him it would be the same price with or without the sides, so he said, “Go ahead and give me french fries with them. She might eat those.”
On the other end of the phone, the Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen staff had already put their thinking caps on.
“Misty, one of my servers, got the phone call,” Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen managing partner, Ben Hallauer, tells TODAY.com. “I mean, we’re all pet lovers. So after that happened, she actually went to my manager, Ron, and was like, ‘Listen … we can’t charge him for this.’”
When Homer picked up his order later that day, the manager gave him the meal on the house as well as his condolences, but there was still more to come.
“When I got back home, I opened up the bag of food to find this card inside with it,” Homer says in the video. “It was laying right on top of her box of food and … it looks like everyone who was on staff that day signed it. So, I just want to publicly say thank you Cheddar’s for being so kind and thoughtful. It really meant the world to me.”
But how did Bella feel about her last meal?
“She really loved it,” Homer tells TODAY.com. “I cut it up into pieces and hand-fed it to her … and she ate the french fries, too.”
Bella actually died back in 2023, but Homer says it took him two years to be able to share his story because losing her was so hard.
“Her hips gave out on her and she just was in so much pain,” he says. “I got to where I’d have to pick her up to carry her outside … I just didn’t want to see her suffering.”
Though Bella is no longer with us, more than 3.4 million views later, her memory is lives on with people around the world.
“I’ve received a lot of love, a lot of really kind messages,” Homer says, adding that many folks in the comments talked about the loss of their own pets. “Everybody has a story. And if you have a dog, hopefully you get it.”
On Aug. 29, Homer posted an update, saying that Cheddar’s saw his video and mailed him a care package, complete with a cozy blanket and a card signed by several staff members.
“I mean, we’re real people. At the end of the day, we feel these same things,” Hallauer says. “We want to do this with people, we all deal with things like this. We want to be able to give back.”
Homer, his wife and daughter, their two surviving dogs, Toby and Waylon, and cat, Kitty, are thrilled with how Cheddar’s treated them that day. Homer says, on that very hard day, compassion from an unexpected source was so welcome.
“To you, your dog is a huge part of your life but to your dog, you are everything,” he says. “You’ve got to be where they’re right there with them, holding their paw, looking them in the eye.”
