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South LA Cafe Goes Beyond The Basic Pandemic Grocery
A community food drive inspired massive donations and celebrity endorsements, feeding more than (70,000 people and still counting).
All Zagat Stories are written by our editorial team. This story is presented by our partner Chase Sapphire®.
Through the difficulties of the past year, restaurants have been there for their communities. They’ve pivoted to takeout, provided meals to essential workers, and so much more. The Sapphire Supports Restaurants Contest is awarding $50,000 business grants from Chase Sapphire to 20 small-business restaurants across America to provide COVID-19 pandemic recovery assistance. Zagat Stories is featuring interviews with all of our Sapphire Supports Restaurants Contests grant recipients.
We do lunch Tuesday through Friday, and we do some southern comfort food on those particular days. As the restaurant was shut down for indoor dining, to create some more revenue I decided that we would do comfort food all day. That allowed the servers in the restaurant to do deliveries and create some revenue for them. It was just survival mode.
We started off doing about 25 to 30 lunches a day. I was like, “Well, if we’re already set up to do 25 or 30 lunches, I feel like we can do more.” So we put out on social media that we were going to offer free school lunches for children that were at home and didn’t have a hot lunch during the week, and it just took off like crazy.
Our goal has always been to give back. I’ve always wanted a restaurant, and I love to help people. The restaurant was a vehicle for us to provide a dining experience with the highest quality of food. Of course this is a business, but I also want to help my community, whatever that means along the way. Two or three years into the business, I teamed up with Watchmen of the Streets, which is a homeless outreach program in Charlotte. We would take cooking equipment, fine china, and the best quality food that we use at the restaurant, and we would hike back into the woods to the homeless camps and cook for them. We did that for quite some time.
