NETJETS US VOLUME 12 2020

HELPING HANDS
If anything heartening has come out of
the COVID-19 pandemic, it is the widespread
effort of chefs—most of them forced to close
their restaurants or lay off staff at least
temporarily—to take care of their communities.
The initiatives have come from the leaders of
restaurants around the world and at all levels of
the food chain, from the humblest burger joint
to the starriest of fine dining. Together, they’ve
helped eased the crisis for all kinds of people,
from fellow restaurant workers, to hospital
staff, to the unemployed to—as in Munk’s
case—the homeless and drug addicted.
The outreach is all the more remarkable
for its origins in an industry that has been
among the hardest hit economically. Globally,
the restaurant industry is expected to lose
$600 billion in 2020, a 25–30% loss over
the previous year, according to food service
consultancy Technomic, and millions of
restaurant workers have lost their jobs—more
than 5 million in the U.S. alone.
“That’s what hospitality is about,” explains
Ravinder Bhogal, chef and co-owner of
London’s Jikoni. “It’s about looking after people.
At the simplest level, if you cook it’s because
ultimately you want to nurture.”
SOON AFTER THE British government-mandated
restaurant closures, Bhogal realized she could
continue to nurture. “We were reading every day
about how under pressure health care workers
were,” she recalls. “I thought, we have a kitchen
that’s not in use, we should use it to help back
up our National Health Service.” Bhogal did
all the cooking herself, and her husband and
restaurant co-owner, Nadeem Lalani, did the
cleaning. Volunteer drivers delivered the food to
the hospital. “The response was amazing, and
we were massively touched by it,” she says.
“We had nurses writing us after they got home
from a 14-hour shift to say how comforting it
was to have one of our meals.”
Jikoni was not alone. From the very beginning
of the crisis, the hospitality industry has stepped
in to take care of those on the front line. After Fang
Zhongqin decided to use up ingredients in his
closed Chao Yue Xiang restaurant by cooking for
local hospitals, his chefs soon found themselves
preparing 1,300 meals a day for grateful medical
staff in Wuhan, China. Similar initiatives have
spread nearly as quickly as the virus itself, from
Han Li Guang Labyrinth in Singapore to Mauro
Colagreco’s top-ranked Mirazur in Menton,
GLOBAL VIEW
José Andrés founded World
Central Kitchen in 2010 and
has helped those suffering
from the earthquakes in Haiti
to the current pandemic.
France, to Pim Techamuanvivit’s Michelinstarred
Kin Khao in San Francisco. In Atlanta,
Feed the Frontline collects donations to purchase
meals from restaurants such as Linton Hopkins’
Holeman and Finch—an effort that not only raised
$800,000 and funded meals for 11,000 hospital
workers, police, and firefighters in its first week,
but also, over time, has created enough work for
those restaurants to be able to hire back some of
their furloughed staff.
OTHERS HAVE FOCUSED their energies on helping
the network that normally depends on them: the
farmers, fishers, and craftspeople who have seen
their own livelihoods imperiled by the abrupt
downturn in eating out. Determined to fulfill their
responsibility to producers and help them build
an alternative path to consumers, many chefs,
such as Dylan Watson-Brawn of Berlin’s Ernst,
Manoella Buffara of Brazil’s Manu, and Dylan
Jones and Bo Songvisava of Bangkok’s Bo.lan,
turned themselves into grocers of a sort, offering
boxes of the same high-quality vegetables, fish,
and eggs they buy directly to customers. Dan
Barber not only organized these fresh ingredients
into boxes (along with recipes for turning it all into
a delicious meal) that allowed him to continue
to support the farmers who normally supply his
Blue Hill restaurants in New York, but also helped
create Harvest Corps, which linked unemployed
hospitality workers with farms suffering labor
shortages due to COVID-19. “Small farms are the
ones you want to keep around,” he says. “But it’s
EMILIANO GRANADO/REDUX/LAIF
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