CICHYS GARRAGE

For the car-ignorant consumer Cichy's, and the owner Mitch in particular, are a godsend.  We've been going to Cichy's for years and keep coming back for larger repairs/service despite having moved farther away.  What keeps us coming back is Mitch - he's highly informative, never makes you feel like you can't ask questions, and in the end you know you can trust your mechanic.
Specifics:

• for a stereo repair, found a place he could send it out to for at least $100 less than we'd been told before
• recently had our 2004 Odyssey minivan in for a general health check up to keep it going.  There were over a dozen items large and small that needed to be taken care of.  As usual, Mitch explained each one to us novices.  Because the total was over $1200 we called a chain to see about getting one thing (alignment and rotation) for less ... they asked what else we were doing and gave a quote for the rest of the job that seemed to be much less.  When I then talked to Mitch, he was perfectly happy to break down his quote and give me more information - in the end it turned out that the chain was paying attention to all the details of what our van needed, and we went with Mitch.  In the above, we had come in saying the timing belt had never been done - Mitch checked *his* records and found that he'd done it three years earlier, saving us the cost of the belt (and water pump)