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 <strong>2020</strong>, 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 FOC<strong>US</strong>ED 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 62 NetJets
GEORGE RUTGERS “That’s what hospitality is about. At the simplest level, if you cook it’s because ultimately you want to nurture.” Ravinder Bhogal NetJets 63
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