An unnamed woman in California brightened up everyone’s day, when she picked up the restaurant’s lunchtime tab.

The staff at the Newcastle, California branch of Denny’s revealed the anonymous customer to be a mother in her mid-30s, who had her two young children with her.

Tom Klepac has worked at various restaurants over the course of 40 years. In all that time, he’s never seen such an act of kindness: “I asked her, I said ‘Are you sure?”, he said to the woman. “She said ‘yeah.’ I said ‘It’ll be a lot of money.’”

“There was people, their meals were like 10 or 12 bucks. That one table there was 50 some dollars,” he said. “It just put a smile on everyone’s faces because we got to go to each individual table and tell them that some young lady just paid for all their meals.”

The enigmatic woman didn’t reveal why she paid for everyone’s meals, or whether she was a lottery winner. Tom just said that she was: “She was very nice, very humble,” and would have to be, in order to do so.

“People thought we were joking. She didn’t want anybody to know she paid and then she left,” Carol Kronberger, a Denny’s waitress said.

One of the customers who received the free meal commented too. Carol Owens said: “It’s wonderful. I wish more people would do things like that.” Another man added: “It shows there are people that care out there.”

Whoever she was, she has a whole list of people waiting to thank her.

Have you witnessed a random act of kindness like this before?