‘Hibernating’ Harlem Eating places Feed Employees During Closure

HARLEM, NY — A pair of Harlem dining places that closed quickly just after the city’s newest spherical of eating restrictions have been converted into makeshift food items pantries to feed the neighborhood’s cafe employees.

© Courtesy of Cathy Nonas
The team held its first distribution Friday at Lido, wherever 22 cafe staff and their family members bought a few baggage each and every of new groceries.

Italian eatery Lido and pan-Asian restaurant Bixi, both of those owned by Susannah Koteen, shut their doorways in late December and early January, searching for to wait out a pandemic winter season that got even bleaker adhering to the shutdown of indoor eating.

Nevertheless they are only “hibernating,” the closures intended that about 50 staff among the two eating places had been suddenly out of do the job.

“I feel terrible,” Koteen stated. “Some of my individuals are not capable to get unemployment advantages, so they are just household not creating revenue.”

Koteen received in touch with the nonprofit Foods For Good, whose CEO, Cathy Nonas, attained out to Indivisible Harlem. The trio began to elevate funds to buy groceries for the recently unemployed personnel.

Immediately after putting the word out to other shuttered restaurants together Frederick Douglass Boulevard, the team held its first distribution Friday at Lido, where 22 cafe personnel and their people got 3 baggage each individual of clean groceries, stuffed with eggs, milk, canola oil, generate, canned foodstuff and other essentials they experienced asked for.

The team is planning to keep the distributions at the very least the moment a thirty day period until eventually indoor dining resumes.

“We prepare, as a neighborhood, as that proverbial village, to carry on to service this local community as the need to have grows,” Nonas wrote in an e mail.

To donate to the energy, go to mealsforgood.org/just take-action.