Second, a pattern worth naming because it describes so many of these orders: the buyer does not live here any more. El Monte raised a generation that bought houses out in Chino, Corona, Riverside, Fontana and Rancho Cucamonga, and an hour of freeway now separates a lot of adult children from their parents' front door. So the anniversary order gets placed from the Inland Empire — or from Sacramento, or Texas — and it has to work without the sender present. Three details make that reliable. Write the address the way the family uses it, including the space number if the parents are in a mobile-home park and the rear unit if there are two houses on the lot. Put your own phone number on the order rather than your mother's, so that any question comes to you and the surprise survives. And check the ZIP: 91734 and 91735 are post-office boxes only and cannot take a delivery, so if that is what you have written down, get the street address first. If the parents are the kind of couple who will not open the door to a stranger, say so and ask the bench to call on arrival — it is a normal request here, not a difficult one.
Third, the restaurant question, which is where anniversary orders most often go wrong in this city. The places an El Monte couple actually eats — the family restaurants along Garvey Avenue and Valley Boulevard, a taquería, a noodle house — have a cash register and a busy counter, not a host desk that will keep a bouquet cold for two hours. Do not send flowers there. The exception is the Chinese banquet rooms out along Valley in Rosemead and San Gabriel, where a large table is booked under a surname and the staff will hold and place an arrangement if you give them the reservation name and seating time; call the restaurant first and then put that name on the delivery instructions. For the bigger anniversaries, the dinner is more likely to be out of town: Clearman's North Woods Inn on Rosemead Boulevard, the dining rooms up around Westfield Santa Anita and Huntington Drive in Arcadia including Din Tai Fung, or the older Arcadia rooms near Santa Anita Park. When the evening involves a hotel it is almost always the Embassy Suites on East Huntington Drive in Arcadia, the DoubleTree on Montebello Boulevard in Rosemead, or the two hotels facing each other on Valley Boulevard in San Gabriel — all inside the radius, all needing the guest surname and the check-in date, and all better served by a late-afternoon window than a morning one, since housekeeping cannot put flowers in a room that has not been released yet.