Project Restore Us: Mei Mei and Pagu Feed the Community

Photos by Brian Samuels

In February of 2020 Mei Mei restaurant’s tiny dining room was full of noise and happy guests. Since the beginning, when Mei Mei launched as a food truck in 2012, its mission has always included using locally and ethically sourced ingredients, creating good jobs and having a positive impact on the local community. 

On the other side of the Charles River, Pagu Restaurant was having a slow winter. Chef and owner Tracy Chang serves food inspired by Spanish and Japanese cuisines in her chic Mass Ave dining room and patio. Being located near so many pharmaceutical companies gave her “a little bit more notice [about the coming pandemic] than other parts of the state and parts of Boston...We immediately saw sales start to decline in the first week of March.” 

Pagu closed its doors on March 15th. 

Mei Mei reduced their occupancy on March 14th and closed their once-clamoring dining room on the 16th. 

Chef Tracy Chang, Pagu

The challenge of adapting to a pandemic loomed over all of Boston’s restaurants. At Mei Mei, worry became the dominant feeling in the little restaurant. Mei Mei’s chef and owner, Irene Li, says, “We were nervous.” 

Chang was highly cognizant of what was at stake: “Our essential workers... need work, they need pay, they need to feed their families [and] they need to send money back to their families in other countries.” Mei Mei and Pagu had to find a way to continue to pay their employees and serve their community. 

The typical wholesale orders Li and Chang regularly sent to their bulk food distributors quickly shrunk. At the same time, lines were forming at grocery stores nearby. One of the people waiting in line was Marena Lin, a postdoctoral fellow at University of California San Diego studying climate change and human migration. 

Chef Irene Li, Mei Mei

Lin was frustrated with the shortages at grocery stores. She reached out to Chang through a mutual friend, who started ordering flour, yeast and eventually a variety of foods for Lin, after she realized just how safe and easy it was for a chef to order large quantities of food: A single person delivers thousands of pounds of food to a restaurant and a single person can reportion it. Lin liked that “restaurants had this supply chain where the food never came into an area where consumers were touching everything.” 

Lin worked with Chang and Li to set up retail grocery fronts in their restaurants. When Chang was asked about creating a program to deliver groceries to people in low-income, high-infection neighborhoods, she says “the choice was automatic.” 

Li also favored delivering groceries rather than prepared meals because “the grocery model has a lot more opportunity to be efficient and to provide food that is culturally legible. It gives people the option to cook their food themselves, the way they would normally cook it.”

Chang, Li and Lin had the space, labor and access to bulk food distributors that they needed to get this project off the ground. But they were missing one thing. Looking back, Lin says “the big piece that we did not have was the connection to the community and a way to find out what they needed… and that’s where Lily came in.” Lily Huang has years of experience organizing labor and immigrant communities in Boston and the Northeast. She leads the fight for workers’ rights as a co-director of Massachusetts Jobs with Justice. 

“We knew that immigrant workers would be one of the groups most affected by the economic slowdown and shutdown,” says Huang. This community faces a dizzying array of obstacles to food security. Many are undocumented and had no access to unemployment or a stimulus check after they were laid off. Even if they did have money to buy food, many immigrant workers contracted Covid from working in restaurants or manufacturing and would expose others to the virus if they went to the grocery store. 

Huang connected Li to Antonio Amaya, the Executive Director of La Comunidad, a Latino-American community organization based in Everett. She connected Chang to Fernando Lemus, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) Local 1445 President, who also happens to sit on the board at La Comunidad. 

During the months of April, May and June of 2020, Mei Mei delivered over 51,000 pounds of potatoes, rice, beans, garlic, onions, masa flour, ginger, oranges and bananas to the working immigrant community of Everett. Pagu delivered another 42,600 pounds to food-insecure families in Somerville and Cambridge. In total, the two businesses provided enough food for about 94,000 meals. “Their feedback was that this was helpful and dignified,” says Huang. “Recipients like that they don’t have to go from city to city and wait in lines at food pantries to get food.”

Li says everything they did “was always about filling in a gap in the supply chain.” There was a glaring, obvious market failure. But many restaurants in the Boston area have underutilized supply chains; Mei Mei and Pagu could have just stuck to doing takeout, or simply shut down to “wait out” the bad times. 

“For a lot of people, this project would make no sense, because it’s not that profitable—or it might not even be profitable at all. But for Mei Mei, it immediately made sense. The staff responded to it right away because of how mission-oriented it was,” says Li. 

Chang credits her family background and her childhood for why she went down this path: “Why do I think that Irene and I happen to be two people that are very active on this front, rather than doing other things with our businesses?... It might have something to do with the way we were raised. We are both Chinese Americans whose families were immigrants.” Both women’s grandparents immigrated to the States and opened restaurants themselves. 

Chang says that “the experience of seeing my grandmother helping others around us who come from similar backgrounds, not being the majority race and not always having the privilege of the majority race,” compels her to use her restaurant to help others too. 

But the biggest obstacle for their new initiative, Project Restore Us (PRU), remains funding to continue their work. 

The first few weeks of Mei Mei’s grocery funds came from a GoFundMe started by Li and Lemus of La Comunidad. Mei Mei also received a small grant from Commonwealth Kitchen, a non-profit small food business incubator in Dorchester. At Pagu, the UFCW funded the first five weeks of groceries. While these sources of funding were enough to launch the project, Li doesn’t want to rely on GoFundMe going forward. Chang wants to be able to work with organizations who can’t provide their own funds like UFCW did.

Increased food insecurity brought on by the pandemic isn’t going away any time soon. It will linger long after stay-at-home orders are lifted. PRU needs a sustainable, institutional source of funding, but they are running into a chicken-and-egg situation. Li describes it like this: “We have to build the model and present it while we are asking for money to use to build it… We don’t have the money to accomplish what we want to accomplish, and the only way we are going to get that money is by showing off what we’ve done so far.” 

PRU is just one of many feeding projects. It fills in a gap in the patchwork quilt of hunger relief efforts and is focused on helping people who fall through the cracks, especially undocumented people. Foundations and other organizations with money to spend are getting mixed messages about who needs help most, where and in what form. 

Lily Huang’s network of local community organizations has the answers. Between her connection to community organizers and the uniquely safe grocery distribution system that Mei Mei and Pagu have created, PRU stands out. The team is now working with Commonwealth Kitchen to launch a fundraising campaign. Their goal is to create a pool of funds that they can use to expand the project and to potentially bring on other struggling local restaurants.

“My goal with PRU was not just to create a model that could get Pagu by. I wanted to make this a feasible plan for other vulnerable restaurants… not just in Boston, but in other cities and states too,” says Chang. But the window of opportunity for bringing more restaurants on board is closing as restaurants re-open and transition their focus from mutual aid to business as usual, even as COVID cases climb. If the state is forced to shut down again, restaurants may once again find themselves in the position that inspired PRU in the first place. Regardless, Li says, “We want to formalize this model, which we think does work, and allow others to replicate it in a way that serves them and serves their communities.”

“In a longer-term sense, it would be great if we got the state and city governments to allocate money towards projects like this. The government already does a lot of hunger relief work but they usually do it with big companies like Sysco,” sayas Li. The government could fortify local economies by giving grants and contracts to local businesses. In May 2020, Governor Baker set aside $3 million dollars in grants to support emergency feeding, though notably, the funds may only be used to build infrastructure and make capital purchases. A refrigerated truck, for instance, would be covered, but actual food would not. Mei Mei applied and has yet to hear back. 

Mei Mei and Pagu have demonstrated that small businesses are uniquely positioned to develop fast and effective solutions during a crisis. Matching supply chain abundance with community need, Project Restore Us is the result of local business owners, local labor organizers and local people working together to support each other, with a goal to restore food security, jobs and hope to the community. 

For more information or to join/support Project Restore Us, click here>>

This story appeared as an online exclusive in September 2020.