NETJETS US VOLUME 12 2020

HELPING HANDS
BIG APPLE, BIG HEART
Daniel Humm and his
team have turned New
York’s Eleven Madison Park
into a soup kitchen.
COURTESY ELEVEN MADISON PARK
an incredibly precarious time for them. If 30-40%
of them go, that’s a generational catastrophe.”
OF COURSE, the catastrophe extends to far more
than just farmers. Vulnerable populations have
been especially hard hit, which is why numerous
chefs have brought their restaurant experience—
and in some cases, their restaurants themselves—
to feed those in need. The initiatives span the
globe from Detroit, where Maxcel Hardy, chef and
owner of COOP Caribbean Fusion has prepared
some 20,000 meals for people living in the city’s
homeless shelters, to India, where Michelinstarred
Vikas Khanna has created a supply chain
that has brought 20 million meals to orphanages,
nursing homes, and poor families. But perhaps no
project represented as dramatic a transformation
as Daniel Humm, who turned his three Michelinstarred
Eleven Madison Park in New York, where
a meal for two cost $1,100, into a soup kitchen.
With private donations and the logistical help of
the organization Rethink, the pristinely elegant
restaurant began cooking for and distributing to
3,000 people a day, from front-line workers to
poor families. “I believe the storm is still coming,
and will be for some time,” Humm posted on
Instagram when he announced the program. “If
we can do just a little something, these dark days
can be just a bit brighter.”
If anyone has experience bringing light to grim
situations, it is José Andrés. The Spanish-born
chef behind several acclaimed restaurants in
Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and New York
started World Central Kitchen (WCK) in 2010 after
earthquakes devastated Haiti, and since then,
the organization has fed millions during times of
crisis that range from hurricanes in Puerto Rico to
Australian wildfires to an early coronavirus outbreak
on a cruise ship docked in Japan. As the pandemic
has worn on, WCK has ramped up its efforts to feed
64 NetJets