As restaurants begin reopening, a Maybrook diner owner is less concerned about promoting his new takeout and dine-in services as he is about promoting a customer who the owner said “replenished my soul.”

Brothers Harry and Johnny Toromanides, owners of Main Line Diner on Route 208, noticed last Monday a gentleman out front, on his hands and knees pulling weeds and spreading mulch in flower beds.

“Who is that guy and what is he doing? Who did you hire to do the mulch outside?” Harry asked his brother.

“Wait. I thought you hired someone and was waiting to ask you who you hired,” Johnny replied.

Harry Toromanides said he and his brother needed a few minutes to comprehend what was happening.

“He’s got his landscaper hat on,” Harry recalled of the man. “He was there in the mulch, just working.”

The man turned out to be a regular customer the Toromanideses know well, but the brothers were still confused. The customer, John Tansosch, simply said he felt a calling to pull the weeds, shape the shrubs, and truck in 60 bags of mulch.

“I said, ‘John, is this true? You’re going to make a sane man crazy,’ ” Harry recalled saying to Tansosch. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“He said, ‘How come you’re doing this?’ ” Tansosch recalled of his initial conversation with the owners. “I said, ‘I’m doing this for the Lord, because the Lord put it on my heart that he wanted me to do this.’ ”

Tansosch, 73, then informed the owners that the landscaping was a solo job and that it was free.

“I tried helping him. He said no,” Harry said. “I tried picking up a bag of mulch. He said no. I tried to give him the money. He said no.”

“[I did this] knowing that a small business, during this time, is really struggling to try to get back on their feet,” said Tansosch, a regular Sunday customer every day for the last year and a half. “They have plenty of expenses. This is just a little something that I have the knowledge to be able to do.”

“I shared it on our social media channel, and it’s taken off like crazy,” Harry said of a social media post he shared this week, thanking Tansosch. “This is what people need to see. This is people going above and beyond.”

Harry added that he is going to “pay it forward” by providing meals to families who are struggling financially due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions that hurt local companies.

“I just wish everybody would be a little kinder, just a little bit,” Tansosch said. “If we would all just be a little bit kinder, this would be a lot better place to live.”