Her Restaurant Breaks All the Rules, and Thrives

Although she isn’t a religious woman in the conventional sense, Cerreta says her faith and prayer allowed her to persevere. One particularly stressful day, when Cerreta had run out of sandwich meat and had no money to buy more, a local street person named Doggers entered the shop and handed her $50. “He said, ‘Denise, I have some money but no place to cook. If I buy you some food, will you make it for me?’ ” Cerreta remembers. She walked with him to the grocery store, and when she explained her predicament, Doggers offered to buy her the roast beef and turkey she needed. “Now he can eat at One World anytime he wants for free,” Cerreta says. “It’s amazing how the answers to your prayers aren’t what you think they’re going to be.”

A few years earlier, Cerreta had learned to trust her intuition and listen to what the universe, or her own subconscious, was trying to tell her. She’d been training in martial arts and was about to take a test for her yellow belt when she had an overwhelming feeling that something would go wrong. She went ahead with the test anyway and ripped a muscle in her groin so badly that her left thigh turned black from bruising. Cerreta thought she’d be bedridden for weeks, but she promised herself that if her leg healed sooner, she’d never again ignore such a strong feeling. The leg healed in 10 days.

That’s why Cerreta paid attention in June 2003 when, about a month after her experience with Doggers, she had what she describes as a Field of Dreams moment: a strong feeling that she needed to let customers pay whatever they wanted. “It was such an unusual phenomenon, and it hasn’t happened to me since,” she says, laughing at how unlikely it sounds.

Cerreta recalls the first customer who came in after her revelation—a dark-eyed woman glowing with good health. “Just price your own food,” Cerreta told her. The woman looked shocked but dropped her money
into a basket on the counter, smiled and left. Cerreta, not checking to see how much the woman had paid, felt a surge of recognition, thinking, oh my gosh, this is my purpose.