Samaria Hunter
By Joel Rubin
Toastique Gourmet Toast and Juice Bar (www.toastique.com) is a 21st century breakfast/lunch place.
With hearty helpings of such ingredients as avocado, smoked salmon, lump crab, peanut butter, Tuscan tuna, and ricotta atop healthy sourdough and other breads, plus filling bowls called Mango Tango, Cocolada, PB+B and OG Acai, seven fruity smoothies and many cold pressed juices (like Recharge, Cure, Defender and Radiance), customers quickly discover this is not IHOP or Waffle House.
“We do have coffee and oatmeal, but we are your sugar and gluten free alternative,” says owner Samaria Hunter, who along with husband TC is turning heads at Summit Pointe, the “Town Center” of Chesapeake, located in Greenbrier around Dollar Tree’s corporate headquarters.
Samaria (or Sam) and TC, opened their first Toastique franchise (headquartered in the DC area) just over a year ago and is seeing business grow as more people become aware of the wide array of places to dine at Summit. “It’s a terrific community,” says the Charleston, SC native who graduated high school early at 17 and enlisted in the Navy, serving 25 years in maintenance, surface warfare, and cyber security before retiring in 2011 as a lieutenant commander. “I also have three master’s degrees and have run six Marine Corps Marathons.”
TC, a retired Navy chief, is still doing IT for the government while helping raise the couple’s kids, a combined six with one teenage son still at home. His sister is Delceno Miles, an uber busy local PR exec and non-profit legend. “I am surrounded by very accomplished women.” But few have the total backstory of his wife.
Indeed Sam Hunter will tell you she is blessed to be alive. As a cyber security manager at Newport News Shipbuilding following her military service, she began having leg spasms. “Doctors did tests and confirmed I had a brain tumor,” a stunning diagnosis that led to surgery at Duke University and radiation treatment at the Hampton University Proton Therapy Center. “I had fantastic doctors and care at both places.”
Today the tumor is stable. “I have an annual MRI to confirm that,” she says. The experience though was life changing, inspiring this remarkable mom, veteran and entrepreneur, just six weeks after surgery, to start WINKS, which stands for “With INtentional Kindness and Support.”
“We have an all-volunteer corps of friends and survivors who provide emotional, financial and logistical assistance to brain cancer patients, some of whom will sadly die within 12-14 months,” says Sam. “We help all of them and their caregivers understand what they are facing, empower them and provide the one-on-one help they need.”
Sam says there are a million people in America living with brain cancer, 3,600 right here in Hampton Roads. “WINKS is in effect my second job,” one reason she pursued the last of those three master’s, an Executive MBA so she could be uber proficient at managing both a business and a non-profit. To raise money for the latter, WINKS will host Tee Up for Brain Tumors on May 18 at Top Golf in Virginia Beach. (https://register.winksbt.org/)
“She is remarkable,” says her spouse. TC has been a rock too, being the go between during cancer treatment with his wife’s many worried loved ones. “God had a plan for me,” says Sam. She is clearly fulfilling it.
