The chef comes on Eater’s Digest to discuss his Restaurant Workers Relief Program
As the crisis of the pandemic has deepened, major donors (including governments, individuals, and brands) have begun paying restaurants to stay open to feed the needy. These relief efforts are happening both at a grassroots level in local communities and on a national scale. One such national effort is run by The Lee Initiative and Louisville chef Ed Lee. He currently has enough funding to maintain 15 community kitchens across the country, feeding those in need over 300 meals a day, seven days a week, by partnering with chefs like Edouardo Jordan in Seattle, Greg Baxtrom in New York, and Nancy Silverton in LA.
This week on Eater’s Digest, Lee explains how he set up the kitchens, shares what kind of help they need, and discusses the heartbreaking decisions he’s forced to make on a daily basis as he navigates through this tragedy.
Listen and subscribe to Eater’s Digest on Apple Podcasts and read the full transcript of the interview below.
Amanda Kludt: Ed Lee, welcome to Eater’s Digest. We wanted to bring you on because you are on the ground running a lot of relief efforts across the country and we wanted to get a firsthand look at what that is like. So can you start off by telling us about what the LEE Initiative is doing with restaurants around America?
Ed Lee: We started a program called the Restaurant Workers Relief Program. And we are feeding any and all restaurant workers who have been laid off or who have had their hours significantly reduced, and who just need food supplies come to us. We have 15 kitchens right now running across the country. Most kitchens are open seven nights a week and we’re handing out about 300 meals a night, giving out supplies and meal kits and things that you can cook at home as well.
Daniel Geneen: Where are you getting the money for this?
EL: To backtrack a little bit, our nonprofit called the LEE Initiative was a wonderful but very small nonprofit and we had a partnership with Maker’s Mark already, and we were doing a women’s chef initiative that was helping to empower women cooks across the country. When the restaurant shutdown happened, I own three restaurants in Louisville and we just out of necessity, we took all the food and just started cooking it because it was all going to go bad. I said instead of wasting this food, we should feed at least our staff that we had to lay off.
We started it that way and we realized quickly that this wasn’t just going to be our problem, this wasn’t a Louisville problem, that this was going to be a big national problem. The director of the LEE Initiative is a lady by the name of Lindsey Ofcacek, and she has a great relationship with Maker’s, and she called them and said, “Hey, you should see what we’re doing because I think this is something that we should go national with.” And to their credit, they quickly responded, saw what we’re doing. So March 16th was the first night that we officially opened and we fed about 300 people that evening. And they quickly saw that this was going to be something that should be replicated. And in the next two weeks, we opened 14 relief kitchens around the country.
AK: And how much is it costing to keep these going?
EL: A lot. So, basically, Maker’s gives us the funds to keep a kitchen open for roughly two weeks. We feed about 300 people a day out of each kitchen. We quickly realized after a week that this wasn’t a two week problem. We’re in early April. Most kitchens have already been running at two, almost three weeks now. And the way we see it, best case scenario, the lockdown will happen until early May, mid-May. So, we’re looking easily at another four to six weeks.
So, while the Maker’s funding was great and they’re helping us continually to help fundraise, we’re looking at the general public. We’re signing on with different companies as well. I literally just got off the phone with Tabasco who’s going to come up with a very generous donation and to help us continue to fund this. I think as we show what we can do and how quickly we can expand, I think the bigger companies are coming to us now and saying, how can we help because this is not, it’s not a two week problem, it’s not a four week problem. It’s going to be longer. And so, we’re all just digging our heels knowing that this is a long term investment. We have to keep these kitchens open for the entire length of the shutdown. So, that’s our main focus right now.
DG: So how has it actually been working with the money? It must be challenging for you to organize and distribute the actual dollars.
EL: I’m a chef, that’s not my job. I never thought I would have a full time job as a nonprofit person. But times are what they are. I am incredibly lucky to have Lindsey on board who has spearheaded this whole project, and you guys should have her on the show after it’s all over. She’s swamped in phone calls and logistics all day long. But she’s basically on the ground every day figuring out who gets what funds, how funds are distributed. We quickly built a model on our website where when you donate on a website, you can scroll down and pick the city that you want the money to go to. And that’s helped tremendously. Every dollar that gets raised by Seattle goes right back to Seattle. Same for Boston, New York, Chicago. And that’s helped tremendously. So we track all those donations.
Neither of us slept for that first week. It was nonstop. As we were busy with phone calls during the day, and then literally overnight, we would write up logistics and policies and guidelines for all the restaurants to follow because we have to be safe. Every city, especially in the early days, which is three weeks ago, every city was on a different track. Some cities were really more loose, some were sheltered in place, some were locked down. Some restaurants were still open. So every city had a really different kind of trajectory they were on. Now everyone’s on lockdown. It was really confusing and we were going at such a breakneck speed that we were just working overnight, creating policies and just on the phones during the day time talking to chefs, sponsors, figuring out how to track money.
The LEE Initiative had two employees when we started and that was a challenge. And now we’re up to five. We quickly hired three people. We keep growing and we’re going to see this through to the end.
AK: How did you choose which restaurants to work with across the country?
EL: In the beginning, Maker’s had recommendations about which markets that they wanted to open. They sort of gave us, they didn’t really choose, but they gave us the cities that they would like to see the relief work in. And obviously, they were the obvious cities. It was the cities with the most restaurant density with the most people who were in need the most. LA, San Francisco, Chicago, New York. And then for us, it was really difficult because we didn’t have the time to completely vet out every single chef, every single person. So I really had to rely on my relationships, my instincts, and to really call chefs that I knew intrinsically that I could trust, that I knew would do the right thing who really had a track record of giving back to the community.
It’s not as though I’m running 15 relief kitchens. I’m really partnering with 14 chefs around the country and saying, let’s work together, but I’m going to need you to sort of take the lead in each community in each city because Nancy Silverton knows Los Angeles better than I do. She was the first person I called, and I said, “Do you want to work with us and do this, and we’ll help fund you with the seed money and then you take it from there?” And she did in Los Angeles raised like $20,000 I think, something like that in three days. And so that money went back to her. Obviously, she unfortunately contracted the COVID. So we then had to quickly pivot and now we’re working with Jessica Koslow of Sqirl.
It’s been a challenge. Every single city has its own challenges, its own needs. But every chef has stepped up and they’ve been amazing to work with.
DG: Yeah. What can go wrong if you’re working with someone who’s not I guess a trustworthy partner?
EL: The funds have to be spent responsibly, and that’s the most important thing. Obviously, we have ways of tracking invoices and tracking labor and making sure that the kitchens are staying open. That’s basically the one and only thing that you can, as well as safety measures. We haven’t had a problem with any restaurant. In fact, we’ve asked every single restaurant to stay open for two to three weeks. And every single restaurant and chef that we’ve talked to have come back to us and said, we’re going to do this for a month, we’ll figure it out, but we’ll do it for a month.
If there’s a silver lining to all this, it’s, again, you can’t say enough about these restaurants and the chefs and what they do and how they look after their own communities. It’s been a real silver lining to see this, to see people rise up and do this. At a time when I, I know that there are other people on the front lines fighting for government to help us out, knowing that independent restaurants will probably not get the bail out money that some of these other big industries are going to get, and yet, here we are once again coming out, helping, doing what we can, giving of our own time and money. It’s just what we do.
AK: Can other restaurants join the program or is the focus on extending?
EL: Yeah. The biggest battle we’re facing right now is none of us know how long this is going to go on for. We have the money, so whenever we get money, we have to make a choice. We either open a new market or we keep another market going for longer. I wish I had a crystal ball and someone could tell me exactly when this is going to last till because then we could budget but we can’t. So right now we’re going on the notion that mid-May is hopefully when this shutdown gets lifted. But if not, we’re in trouble. And the idea is, what we don’t want to do is expand to 30 kitchens and then have to shut them all down with a month left to go because that’s not a goal.
So really, the priority is to keep the existing kitchens going for as long as they can throughout the entire shutdown. And then when we do have an influx of money, like for example, Tabasco coming on board, then we feel like we’re comfortable enough we can open a new kitchen. And we’re hopefully going to open one up by end of this week or early next week. We have another one coming on board and maybe another one after that. So we’re just constantly going back and forth to see which one is, we want to ensure the security of the ones that are already open and running because they’re doing great work.
DG: So you had some just make that decision whether to keep the ones open that are open or expand.
EL: I’ll be honest with you, and for all the people out there who have emailed me and called me, some I’ve answered, some I can’t, the biggest heartbreak through this whole thing is, I get phone calls every day from people in every city across America. And it’s heartbreaking to say no to them because we just don’t have the funds. But I get calls from Richmond, Virginia, from Austin, from Tennessee, from Oklahoma. And you realize like the staggering amount of suffering that’s going on. You read words like 11 million workers, and it’s just a number. And then you read these emails from people saying, please, please open a relief kitchen here because we need it, and you can’t.
It’s staggering to think about how many people are out of work in the restaurant business, and they’re not getting any help. Unemployment is coming in, but if you have a family, it’s not enough. It simply is not enough. It’s every single city, every town in America, every village, every hamlet is suffering. We can’t get to all of them. It’s an emotional roller coaster ride because every day we have to make tough decisions and say, we can open here, we can’t open here, we can do this, we can’t do that.
We know that for every piece of the puzzle, we’re helping someone here, that also means we’re not helping someone over there. And that’s the hardest part of it.
DG: For me one of the toughest things about this has been seeing the people who are really stepping up and taking on an important role then being faced with impossible decisions.
EL: Yeah. It’s truly a catastrophe. It’s truly triage. The economic fallout from this is just unbelievable. It’s unbelievable. We have 15 kitchens across the country. We need thousands. Right now, we’re working on public donations and private sector funding. I think there needs to be a bigger conversation happening. We need federal money to open kitchens. We have millions of unemployed restaurant workers who are capable of cooking, taking a little bit of money and cooking many, many meals out of it. We have idle kitchens all across the country that can be used to feed people.
And one of the things that we’re not talking about is, because we shut down the restaurants, that was a major, restaurants are not a luxury. There’s some restaurants that are luxury restaurants, but for most communities, there’s an entire outlet of restaurants that people rely on for their dinner. And we cut off that flow overnight. And so now, everything has been shifted to people are cooking at home. And let’s be honest, there’s a lot of people who don’t know how to cook. And so now we’re creating this absolute chaos where everyone is running to a supermarket trying to buy up and hoard whatever’s leftover. I can’t even begin to imagine how much food is being wasted because people don’t know how to cook.
And so, we have this incredibly broken system right now where the supermarkets can’t keep their shelves stocked, the internet companies are running out of supplies every night. No one knows where to get their food from. There’s lines, there’s unsafe spaces, and yet there’s restaurants that could be feeding people that are forced to be closed. We need to open up as many kitchens as we can. And chefs can do a better job of taking a limited number of supplies and efficiently and cost effectively creating edible meals for an entire population. That’s something that, obviously, Jose Andres is doing his work. There’s a ton of other grassroots movements that are going around over the country, but it’s not enough. We literally need thousands and thousands of kitchens to be mobilized. That would help. That’s a bigger discussion and I don’t know if that’s going to happen over the next six weeks.
AK: And for people who are listening that do want to help, besides calling their representative, how can they help? What should they do?
So, you can go on www.leeinitiative.org. You can donate funds and you can click down and choose which city you want to donate to. But then there’s so many other things. All of us are in need of supplies to hand out. For example, this week is Easter and we just realized that like many families are not going to celebrate Easter just because right now, if money is short, the last thing you’re going to do is buy candy for your kid. And so, we’re asking for people to donate candies to the restaurant, chocolates, we can hand out. It seems like a small thing, but what we’ve learned in the last three weeks is sometimes it’s the little things that really brighten someone’s day and it keeps them going, gives them some sense of normal. And it’s really important.
Last week in Louisville, a florist gave us a ton of flowers for free. And so, we handed out small bouquets to everyone. And I can’t tell you how many people cried and were just so ecstatic over a bouquet of flowers just because it gave them some sense of hope. So, things like that are really important emotionally. If you go on our website, you can see all of the participating restaurants. You can go on your Amazon account or your Instacart account, buy stuff, but have it drop shipped to the restaurant, so they can take it and hand it out. Supplies are in such short supply right now that it’s hard just to keep up. But also-
DG: On that, are there specific supplies that you guys are the most short on?
EL: So it depends. Cities like Louisville and Cincinnati and Atlanta where there’s a lot of families, it’s diapers, it’s baby food, it’s school supplies. Places like New York and LA where there is a younger, more single population, it’s much more food. But also, places like LA and New York that have a larger Hispanic population, it’s really specific foods. It’s rice, it’s beans, dry pasta, things that they need. So every market is a little bit different. But I would say at the end of the day, it’s toiletries and shelf stable food is what people are needing. Those are very valuable commodities these days.
DG: I think this would maybe go a little bit, but on, I don’t want to say a lighter note, but are there any, being somewhat at the helm of all these kitchens in a strange way, is there culinary advice or best practices you’ve seen in terms of actually making the food?
EL: Yeah. Cooking for, and it’s funny because, like in my kitchen, we struggled in the early days because we’re a 50 seat restaurant, we do fine dining. And so, cooking for 300 a night is not what we’re used to. Things that are comforting, things that you know, can be easily reheated is really important because we can’t always serve a hot meal. So, when we do meatloaf, garlic mashed potatoes and blistered string beans, it’s great because it really satisfies a broad spectrum of people. But also, it’s something that can easily be reheated. And if you don’t eat it all that night, it’s just as good the next day. We try to stay in that realm knowing that most people are taking these meals and going home with everyone going home with it because we’re all on lockdown. And so you can easily reheat it at home. So noodles are great. Anything that has a bit of a shelf life, like seafood is not the best because it just doesn’t last the next day if you need it.
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