ADVERTISEMENT

    Service! Dishing Up First Meals to Local Hospitality Workers

    A group of local restaurant industry veterans are banding together to feed their own. Service! A relief effort for hospitality workers, is dishing up its first free meals this week.

    ADVERTISEMENT

    It all started as a simple oh-crap-what-happens-now conversation between two local restaurant owners – Sangeeta Lakhani of The Table and Matthew Heaggans of Ambrose & Eve and Preston’s. Bonding over a mutual understanding of the tough predicament their businesses are in, the conversation turned to how do they help themselves and how do they help their employees?

    Self-described doers that don’t know how to sit still, Lakhani says Heaggans rallied the support of his Muse Hospitality group, which includes his business partner Catie Randazzo, Letha Pugh of Bake Me Happy and Reed Woogerd, and they started making phone calls.

    “The nice thing about a place like Columbus and having owned restaurants in Columbus for so many years is that you do create an amazing network,” Lakhani says. “People do come out to help when you need.”

    They were able to quickly nail down a commercial kitchen space through the Food Fort at ECDI, and land a non-profit fiscal partner so they could start receiving donations. The LOUD Capital Pride Fund and CoverMyMeds offered the first dollars to start buying food and supplies.

    With a kitchen and some money, it was time to dive in and get started.

    Over the weekend, the Service! team got settled in the Food Fort kitchen. Lakhani says the first order of business was to scrub the kitchen from top to bottom and set up a process for employees to enter the kitchen, take their temperatures and get gloved and masked up.

    “We want to make sure we run a really safe, efficient kitchen,” Lakhani says. “We want to be very transparent with the fact that we’re taking this very seriously.”

    The kitchen is staffed with employees from The Table and Muse Hospitality, with hopes of bringing in even more workers as Service! ramps up the number of meals it’s serving.

    This week, Service! will dish out 200 meals per day. The ultimate goal, though, is 400-500 meals per day, seven days a week.

    To secure a meal from Service!, industry workers will order through the organization’s website – servicerelief.org and select a pickup window for the following day.

    The pre-portioned meals will be picked up cold to be reheated at home. Each day there will be a meat and a vegetarian option, with a focus on healthy eats. Lakhani says as much as they want to provide comfort food given the situation, they want to make sure folks can access at least one good, solid healthy meal a day.

    Lakhani and Heaggens plan the menus, this week whipping up dishes like lettuce wraps with chicken or tofu, baked mac n cheese with a side salad and stuffed peppers with or without beef. The meals are not only available for service workers, but their families as well.

    Meals will be transported to each chef’s respective restaurants for pickup – The Table in Short North and Ambrose & Eve in the Brewery District – with help from a cooler truck provided by the Butcher & Grocer.

    Once they get a better feel for who is picking up meals, Lakhani says they’ll look at adding more pickup locations. Knowing that a lot of individuals from the service industry don’t have cars and rely on walking, biking or busing, they want to make sure people that need meals can get them.

    Individuals can support Service! by purchasing a t-shirt through Bonfire.com or send money through PayPal on the Service! website.

    For more information and to order meals, visit servicerelief.org.

    ADVERTISEMENT

    Subscribe

    More to Explore:

    Virus Triple Threat Looms Over us This Winter

    Ohio health officials are urging caution again this winter. But entering our third holiday season with COVID-19, the nature of those warnings is a bit different.

    Anti-Vax Bill Proposed to Ban COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates in Ohio Colleges

    A bill that would specifically ban mandates for COVID-19 vaccines at colleges and universities in Ohio was introduced last week in a House committee.

    Clarion Call About Long COVID

    According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Long COVID...

    Masks No Longer Mandatory on COTA Vehicles

    COTA has lifted its mask mandate, effective immediately. The...
    Susan Post
    Susan Post
    Susan is the editor of The Metropreneur and associate editor of Columbus Underground, and also covers small business and entrepreneurial news and the food scene in Central Ohio.Susan holds a degree in Communication with a minor in Professional Writing from The Ohio State University. She sits on the board of the Central Ohio Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and loves coffee, whiskey, cooking and spending time with friends and family.
    ADVERTISEMENT