PhD graduate invites restaurant owners who fed him for seven years to graduation via delivery order

A doctoral graduate in southern China used a food delivery order to invite the owners of the restaurant that had fed him for seven years to his graduation photos.

The order reached the small Hakka restaurant on the morning of June 23, in Guangzhou's Baiyun District, a few hundred meters from the main campus of Southern Medical University.

In the notes field where customers usually ask for less chili or no cilantro, a diner surnamed Xiong had written a request instead. Would the owner and her husband come to his graduation photo shoot two days later?

"From undergrad to my doctorate, I've eaten at your place for seven years, and I really can't bear to leave," the note read, according to the Guangzhou Daily. "Can I invite you both to come?"

The owner, Luo Na, told Hubei outlet Jimu News that she knew who had sent it before she finished reading. The delivery address was the university, and she recognized the regular at a glance.

Her first thought was that he wanted her to help take his pictures. Only after she messaged him did she understand that he wanted her and her family standing in them.

She was stunned. She had left school in her early teens, and she said she had never once imagined being asked to a graduation.

Xiong has spent more than a decade at Southern Medical University studying integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine. He and his classmates had eaten at the restaurant since his fifth undergraduate year, he told Jimu News, often stopping in late after finishing in the lab.

The delivery note, he said, was the group's idea, a way to mark seven years before they scattered.

Luo's family has run the Meizhou-style Hakka restaurant for more than 20 years. After two decades in the trade, she told the Guangzhou Daily, the happiest part was never the money but being remembered.

The photograph of the order, posted to her social media, drew more than 250,000 likes and a flood of strangers telling her she had to go. She said she would, bringing her husband and their two children, a bouquet, and red envelopes for the graduates.

The delivery note had been pinned to the center of the shop's wall where Luo keeps pictures of her family and her regulars.

The photo shoot itself, first set for June 25, slipped when Xiong's lab schedule got in the way and finally happened at the end of the month. The finished photos, posted by Luo, shows her family lined up beside the graduates in their gowns, everyone grinning. She wrote that she kept the promise.