Doing What They Do Best: Dorchester's CommonTable

Ernie Campbell of Jamaica Mi Hungry

Photos by Michael Piazza

Responding to Covid-19, Dorchester’s CommonWealth Kitchen rallies its network to create CommonTable, bringing food to families that need it

CommonTable, the Covid-19-inspired initiative started by CommonWealth Kitchen, held its soft launch in late April, delivering 500 meals to The Dimock Center in Roxbury for families who needed them. The meals were prepared in CWK’s Dorchester kitchen by a small team of core staffers led by Ismail Samad. CWK member Fresh Food Generation assisted with food production. 

By the time of this writing, just over a month later, the effort had produced and delivered roughly 50,000 meals and grown to include 13 immigrant-owned CWK restaurant partners across Boston. These numbers continue to grow. And as the conditions surrounding the pandemic continue to shift, so do CommonTable’s offerings. But the initiative’s mission, to provide food to families in need, remains constant.

In mid-March, when the state passed an emergency order banning restaurants and bars from serving food or beverages on-site to try to stem the Covid-19 pandemic, CWK co-founder and Executive Director Jen Faigel closed the kitchen. Then she got to work. 

“I knew there would be a need for emergency food,” she says, and she anticipated at the time that the need would likely surpass food banks’ capacity. She also believed there would be a demand for prepared foods, something CWK was well positioned to fulfill. She reached out to the organization’s network of partners, which includes related businesses, community organizations and supporters. The group’s member businesses and graduates are all owned and run by immigrants, women and people of color, producing food products that reflect the community’s cultural diversity.

To prepare for what she saw coming, Faigel started thinking not only about what kinds of food would be needed but also about safety issues for the kitchen: “What are the practices we would use in the kitchen to keep everybody safe? How do you socially isolate in a shared kitchen in general?” At the same time, elder services organizations, food banks, the City of Boston, Boston Public Schools and other organizations started calling, asking whether CWK had the capacity to provide food. But nobody had specific requests. “Everybody was just completely overwhelmed,” she says.

So Faigel took it upon herself to just figure it out. “I felt confident there was a need out there and somebody would pay us to do this,” she says. Once she got all of the systems and plans for the kitchen in order—everybody who enters has a quick temperature read and fills out a questionnaire about possible exposure to someone who is ill; everyone in the kitchen works six feet apart; people work in teams, and if one member becomes sick the whole team stays home; there is a new cleaning and sanitizing regimen—she decided which staff members should come back to work. Some have asthma and other underlying health conditions that would put them at extra risk. Others rely on multiple modes of public transportation. In the end five employees returned to the kitchen at their hourly rate plus 35%. “Everyone we asked to come back came back, in part because they wanted to be part of the solution,” Faigel says.

For the first two weeks Samad worked with his small staff and Fresh Food Generation, a CWK member business that specializes in healthy Caribbean-inspired food. Then Fresh Food Generation moved its CommonTable cooking to the kitchen of nearby Temple Israel. At around that time Faigel brought in Ernie Campbell, chef-owner of CWK member Jamaica Mi Hungry, who brought a handful of his staff. “He’s an incredible chef who can bust it out,” Faigel says of Campbell, adding, “We can pay his staff to get back to work.” 

In the early days the kitchen received 10,000 pounds of fish from Red’s Best, a partner organization, which the chefs turned into fish stew. Other selections have included chicken mole and tikka masala. “People are interested in our model partly because of the diversity of the food that we are able to provide,” says Faigel. “The idea that we could come in and do that was really appealing to a lot of the partner organizations we’re working with.”

“When Covid hit, Jen was challenged with how to continue operations,” says Usha Thakrar, Boston Area Gleaners executive director. “Impressively, she turned on a dime.” BAG, a long-term CWK partner organization, harvests farmers’ surplus crops and distributes the produce to relief agencies that serve families dealing with food insecurity. Faigel approached Thakrar and asked if the organization would be able to source produce for meals. 

The timing worked well for BAG because traditionally May is part of its planning season. Adapting to the Covid-19 era, Thakrar says, has meant adjusting “a little bit of what we’re considering gleaning,” incorporating milk from a dairy farm and even excess milk from Dunkin’ Donuts, for example. And because CommonTable launched before the local farming season began, Thakrar says sourcing initially was “kind of catch-as-catch-can.” (Faigel says there were “a lot of root vegetables.”) But she expects it to become more consistent once farm season shifts into gear. “Farmers are planting as they normally would,” she says. “A lot [of available supply] will depend on what opens up in the coming months.”

Other sourcing partners are as diverse as Effie’s Homemade and Katsiroubas Produce. And CWK is tapping its own larder, using ingredients produced by its member companies whose businesses slowed dramatically, if they didn’t dry up completely, after the pandemic hit. Mole from Mr. Tamole, tikka masala from Meal Mantra, chutneys and spice rubs from Lyndigo Spice are all making their way into meals. And CWK is paying the producers for the products. 

Looking at the bigger picture beyond the current emergency, Faigel asks, “How do you restart a food supply chain and do it in a way that celebrates diversity and culture, that supports the local economy? That’s about sustaining the entire supply chain, from the fisheries to the farmers too, if we can’t find it locally working with local suppliers? We knew it was a good idea to do this but we’re seeing the opportunity to turn this into what a new normal could look like.”

With the CWK meal prep engine humming Faigel moved on to expanding beyond the Dorchester kitchen. That is where immigrant- and minority-owned local restaurants and funding from the Boston Resiliency Fund come in. 

Yahya Noor, chef-owner of Tawakal Halal Café in East Boston, has been something of a media darling lately, having won fans and garnered local and national acclaim for the Somali food he creates at his cozy spot within spitting distance of Logan Airport. But that didn’t ease the pain of having to close his 1½-year-old restaurant in mid- March and letting the staff go. Noor, a CWK graduate, opened for takeout in early May, with help from his mother and sister. Initially, he says, “We were clearly just sitting there.” 

Now he is busy with takeout business as well as meals for Covid relief. He started making 200 meals per week for his neighborhood’s Eastie Farm and was one of CommonTable’s first three restaurant partners, along with Dorchester’s 50Kitchen and Achilitos Taqueria in Jamaica Plain. Each CommonTable meal has to have a meat or other protein and a vegetable. Noor has been making 50 meals a day, five days a week, primarily chicken and spinach with chickpeas. He is hoping to increase production to 500 meals per week. He has been delivering the meals primarily to three organizations.

The work is helping Noor’s community and his business. “We’re not sitting here making money,” he says. “We’re surviving by [the] help we’re getting from CommonTable and Eastie.”

CWK graduate Anthony Caldwell, who had to close his restaurant, 50Kitchen, 30 days after opening, has been surviving with takeout business and providing meals for CommonTable. “I’m all in,” he says.

50Kitchen is closed on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so Caldwell devotes those days to cooking and delivering CommonTable meals—150 each day (25% of them vegetarian) to a Salvation Army in Roxbury. He changes the selections daily, and though he says they are decidedly “not gourmet,” many dishes reflect the Asian-influenced Southern cooking of his restaurant’s menu. The day we spoke he had just prepared beef and vegetable stir-fry with rice, which he conceded was “kinda sorta” like something from the menu. The week before he made bourbon chicken one day with a roasted chickpea-tofu dish as the vegetarian option. And the chef—whose tagline is “beautiful food for beautiful people”—insists, “When I drop it off, it’s got to look good.”

Caldwell says he was not earning enough from takeout to support his business, but the CommonTable money “will let me break even,” while paying his staff.

CityFresh Foods is delivering CWK-produced meals, along with Boston Area Gleaners. BAG started delivering to four locations and quickly increased to six. Like Faigel, Thakrar notes that in mid- to late March it became clear the organization would have to ramp up earlier than usual. They brought back seasonal staffers early and began hiring additional drivers in mid-May. 

When I started working on this story Massachusetts had just passed its coronavirus peak, but daily infection rates were still over 1,000. At press time, daily numbers were in the low three figures and the state had just entered Phase 2 of reopening. Things are feeling a little more 'new normal,' but we are far from being out of the woods. In late May CommonTable launched a pilot initiative with Mei Mei, delivering groceries to Latino communities outside the city, in towns including Everett, Chelsea and Revere. The boxes include fruits and vegetables along with staples like rice, beans and masa. 

“Everything about this is a continuing and moving process,” says Faigel. “As we think about what CommonTable morphs into it may morph away from prepared foods to families in need into a global supply chain with an equity lens. Hopefully we will have solved a lot of the inefficiencies and the frictions in the system.” 

This story appeared in the Summer 2020 issue.