PIZZA MAKER Adrian Stolaj with a beautiful portrait of himself painted by a thankful Alderwood man whose wallet he found and returned. Photos by Tom Godfrey.
A Long Branch pizza maker is making another area resident feel a whole lot better today with a kind deed.
Adrian Stolaj, of Adriano’s Pizza, at Lake Shore Blvd. W., and Twenty Seventh Street, was walking to work earlier this month when he found a thick wallet lying on the roadway near his restaurant.
He picked up the wallet and took it with him to the pizza shop.
“It was a thick wallet with many things packed in it,” Stolaj recalls. “There was a lot of paper and it was bulging.”
He looked at the driver’s license and was able to find the owner of the prized wallet, who lived several kilos away on Brown’s Line, in Alderwood.
The wallet was returned to the owner later that day by Stolaj’s wife, Viola.
“The guy (owner) was very happy,” he says. “I said “that I saved his life,’ since all his documents were in his wallet.”
The wallet it seems had fallen out of his pocket while he was cycling in the area earlier.
The owner, an artist, decided that he would do something special for the honest Stolaj, who went out of his way to reunite him with his wallet.
“He came here for two days and made sketches of me busy at work,” Stolaj says. “Then he came back and brought me this beautiful portrait.”
“I love it. The guy is a good painter,” he says with pride. “I have the portrait in a special place in the restaurant.”
It is the second time that he has found a wallet near his store.
Stolaj is well-known in the Long Branch area for helping out by donating food for community groups, various charities and the homeless.
There are a number of homeless men that he regularly feeds when they stop by.
The shop can be reached at adrianos-pizza.com or dial 416-792-4074.