Hero chefs: How shuttered kitchens are keeping people fed
“Call it a Band-Aid solution if you want to,” said Luke Tsai in Eater.com. The bigger picture shows 9 million restaurant workers suddenly jobless and grocery employees dying of Covid-19. But at Che Fico, a buzzy Italian restaurant in San Francisco, chef David Nayfield acted instantly last month to transform his business and channel aid to people in need. One of his investors, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, had called and offered $2,000 a night to feed 40 hungry families and keep the kitchen operating. Nayfield quickly turned the idea into the Che Fico Family Meal Fund, soliciting individual donations to multiply the impact of the operation. “The millionaire class and the billionaire class,” he says, “they’re just trying to find good ways of giving their money away.”
Top chefs across the country have launched similar efforts, said Alicia Lee on CNN.com.
A day after Louisville was shut down, chef Edward Lee converted 610 Magnolia into a makeshift relief center, using his existing nonprofit (plus seed money from Maker’s Mark) to distribute hot meals and other necessities to laid-off food employees. Lee’s Restaurant Workers Relief Program now has outposts in at least 16 cities. In Manhattan, one of the city’s most acclaimed restaurants, Eleven Madison Park, found a different way to give back, said Amelia Nierenberg in The New York Times. Shortly after chef Daniel Humm laid off most of his 175 employees last month, he reached out to the nonprofit meal provider Rethink and turned his three-Michelin-starred restaurant into a commissary that now produces thousands of meals daily for the city’s heroic hospital workers. Still, the operation has returned only about 20 employees to work, at minimum wage. “It’s a small thing I can contribute,” Humm says. “I hope that people know we’re doing everything we can.”