Illustrations by Jessica Fimbel Willis

The first Saturday in March was Pagu’s busiest of the year, but by March 14 chef-owner Tracy Chang was thinking of closing the restaurant. In late February, fresh off a one-month maternity leave, she earned a James Beard Award semifinalist nomination and was back to working seven-day weeks. But in the first two weeks of March, things didn’t feel the same. The Cambridge pharmaceutical companies that drove her lunch business told their employees to work from home indefinitely, and the streets were empty.

With family in Asia and restaurant-owner friends on the West Coast, Tracy watched the coronavirus news closely. As the numbers climbed in Asia and Europe, she knew staying open wouldn’t be safe. “We’ve got to shut down and reset and figure out what’s next,” she said. “And Natalie’s email coming in was, like... It was, like, ‘Yes, this is next.’”

Natalie Guo didn’t know Tracy but during her time at Harvard Business School she ate at Pagu regularly. After working on the business side of health care as an investor for a few years, she enrolled at Harvard Medical School, and when the coronavirus hit Boston, Natalie was in her clinical rotation at Mass General. A week of emails and meetings warned that the hospital would soon be a very different place, and on Friday, March 13, trainees were told not to report to the hospital unless it was absolutely necessary.

“I found myself Saturday morning with a feeling of, like, ‘Wow, our colleagues, our teachers, our mentors, many people are about to go through the toughest time of their lives in terms of their careers. And many of us who are young and able bodied are being asked to stay at home. And there’s just some mismatch there.’”

At the same time, Natalie was troubled by the headlines about the number of laid-off restaurant workers expected in the coming months. She searched online for ways to donate directly to workers, many of whom are undocumented, but found only general funds like the CDC’s, and it was hard to tell what their impact would be.

Guo had an idea. She knew people with resources who would want to be generous to frontline workers in a time of crisis. “Why not link all these pieces together? And so we would provide a conduit for donors to contribute to restaurants that would hire back some really vulnerable staff. Many of them don’t qualify for unemployment, and they would put together delicious and nutritious meals—way better than vending machines and pizza—and support the frontline hospital workers who are being called to duty and risking their own health for the sake of others.”

Donors could give funds to owners of shuttered restaurants. Restaurant owners could pay staff and vendors. The benefits would be felt all the way down the supply chain, from farmers to truckers to hourly cooks. Typically a planner and an overthinker, by Saturday evening Natalie had brought on her first two partners: Chang and Ken Oringer of Little Donkey, Toro and Coppa, who she had met at an event a few weeks earlier. She emailed 70 friends and raised the first $20,000 that weekend, and the pilot was off the ground. By mid-May, Off Their Plate had raised $5 million and was operating in 10 cities.

“Of course we can do this,” said Tracy. “But it’s not until you’re actually doing it that you realize, like, ‘Wait, there’s all these other steps.’” Restaurants could make and deliver food, but with social distancing restrictions, logistics were complex. Who would touch the containers? What personal protective equipment would drivers need, or cooks? Tracy found a COVID specialist at MIT. With input from scientist and doctor friends, she wrote standard operating procedures for health and safety that could be used in other cities. In the first weeks, chefs drove the meals in their own vehicles; now a highly organized team of volunteers arranges those details.

When the volunteer base expanded beyond Guo and Chang’s personal networks, Tracy pulled in a friend to do HR and organizing. They developed guidelines requiring that half of the money donated goes to restaurant workers, allocating $10 for each meal. Their first fiscal sponsor was CommonWealth Kitchen, but when it became clear that the initiative would expand beyond the city of Boston, they partnered with World Central Kitchen, the international relief organization founded by chef Jose Andres where Tracy’s friend is CEO. World Central Kitchen receives donations and pays the restaurants directly, but Off Their Plate’s own volunteer fundraising team is so strong that they haven’t accepted any funding.

Images of doctors and nurses are especially useful for fundraising purposes, but from day one the team has been adamant about feeding “anyone working on COVID,—janitorial team, HAZMAT team, administrative team,” says Natalie. “Receptionists and, yesterday, doctors and nurses.” Name recognition brings in funding—award-winning restaurants like Chang’s and hospitals like Mass General— which then allows the organization to help lower-profile restaurants and community health centers in neighborhoods harder hit by the virus.

Cecilia Lizotte was struggling with the decision to close Suya Joint, her Roxbury West African restaurant, when she discovered Off Their Plate through Instagram. Initially optimistic about a takeout-only model, by week three of the shutdown there was a drastic decline in her business, and it no longer made sense for a restaurant like hers, a community gathering spot with a 2am license, to stay open. “To be able to pay the staff that we have, as well as the landlord, or even keeping the electricity, keeping the doors open, we couldn’t.” Some regular customers struggled with ordering through the website and others were afraid to order at all. Lizotte wanted to donate her existing inventory to healthcare workers before closing her doors indefinitely. She reached out to Off Their Plate, asking how she could donate to nearby Boston Medical Center. Tracy replied.

For an already-struggling restaurant like Lizotte’s, the program saved the restaurant from closure, kept staff employed and expanded their customer base. “Because my food is so ethnically inclined,” says Lizotte, “we haven’t [previously] been able to reach where Off Our Plate has taken us to. And basically, inside Boston Medical, Mass General, Brigham and Women’s we’re able to now give the flavor of West Africa to such a huge crowd.” A flood of grateful emails from health care professionals has Lizotte feeling optimistic that her customer base will expand when restaurants reopen, but she’s not at all certain that Suya Joint will return as a sit-down restaurant. “When this is all over with, it would definitely be a change of concept because the fact that they’re telling us, ‘Oh, five people at a time or some kind of a distance, eight feet apart.’ I don't see how that is possible.”

In Central Square, a few blocks from Pagu at Little Donkey, chef-owner Jamie Bissonnette meditated in the airlock. His business partner, Ken Oringer, connected with Off Their Plate initially, but Jamie’s been the one on the ground, working 80-hour weeks when he was meant to be on his honeymoon “eating our faces off” in Japan. Oringer and Bissonnette had already decided to close their restaurants before Governor Baker announced the shutdown. “We said, ‘Let's do what we think is right and figure it out from there.’ Here we are almost two months later, and we’re still trying to figure it out.” Like Pagu, their other restaurants are experimenting with groceries and takeout, but Little Donkey made sense for Off Their Plate because of its large size and the volume they can produce, more than 400 meals a day.

Unlike Lizotte, Off Their Plate is not helping Oringer and Bissonnette as business owners. Between the cost of PPE and takeout containers, they barely break even, but it makes a huge difference for their employees, some of whom are not collecting unemployment because they aren’t comfortable, and some “because of other reasons.” Of 35 employees at Pagu, Chang has been able to bring back seven; employees with the greatest need, the most vulnerable who have worked for her the longest, those sending money home to families in El Salvador and Colombia, children they haven’t seen in years.

The future of Off Their Plate is as uncertain as any organization’s is at this moment in history. With a lot of national press, a steady stream of donations and a shoutout in Barack Obama’s Instagram feed, they’re poised to continue for as long as there’s a need, but things may look very different by the time this issue is released. Already, hot spots like Seattle have seen the need decrease as the virus numbers decline. Nobody knows what restaurants will look like in July, or any time thereafter.

“In the medical field and the business community,” says Guo, “there’s this idea that you need to spend decades of your life learning the skills of the trade, and then you will maybe have an impact in the sunset of your career. Your 50s and 60s, when you’re a professor somewhere, maybe you’ll have an impact. And I think I’m surrounded by people at Off Their Plate who are having an impact on their community. And the time to do work that is meaningful to you is now, and that’s something that I’m learning. And a lot of careers, I’m definitely in those lanes that take decades of training and earning their stripes. It just makes me think a little bit differently about that and how much the world needs people who have fewer degrees and more ‘Let’s go, let’s do this.’ That’s what this process has shown me.”

offtheirplate.org
@offtheirplate
Pagu
Little Donkey
Toro
Coppa
Suya Joint
Commonwealth Kitchen