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“There’s two kinds of hungry people right now: There’s people who are hungry for food and there’s people who are hungry to help,” said Mikey Knab, director of operations at the Meza Family Restaurant Group and the national program director of High Road Kitchens.
High Road Kitchens aims to sate both groups of hungry people. By ordering meals through a delivery platform called Tock, those in need pay nothing, while those with cash to spare can choose to make a donation or pay more than the value of the meal. The extra dollars will help cover free meals and, in the best case, provide a profit to the restaurant.
Thirteen restaurants across Los Angeles, Monterey, Oakland, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, and San Jose are participating in the program. High Road Kitchens expanded to New York City on June 11 and hopes to launch in Boston, Washington, D.C., and Michigan in the coming months.
Super Cocina, a family-owned restaurant serving Mexican homestyle cuisine in San Diego, joined the pilot program in May. Before the coronavirus hit, the restaurant employed 13 people. Some employees had worked at the restaurant for 25 years. The most recent hire started five years ago.
“As a family, we made the decision that we wanted to stay open no matter what,” said Juan Pablo Sanchez, general manager of Super Cocina and son of the owners.
But after more than a month with few takeout orders, curtailed hours, and trouble securing a loan from the Paycheck Protection Program, the restaurant was barely getting by. Sanchez had to scale back his staff’s working hours so much that two employees quit.
The restaurant had food on hand and staff to cook plenty of dishes, but not enough people were placing orders.
Knab, who served with Sanchez on the board of a local nonprofit, recruited Super Cocina to the High Road Kitchens pilot program. Sanchez jumped at the opportunity to drive more business to his restaurant and keep his staff employed.
Participating restaurants receive an initial $5,000 grant to cover the costs of ingredients and packaging for carryout meals. High Road Kitchens handles the paperwork with local work-force boards to cover a portion of the wages for the restaurant’s employees through government subsidies. Those public funds vary by locale but typically range from $10,000 to $20,000 per restaurant, Knab said.
“Our goal is to make the program self-sustaining so that after the initial infusion from philanthropy and public money, the restaurants that become High Road Kitchens see such a good flow of cash through donations and paid-forward meals that they continue to do it infinitely,” said Knab.
In exchange for much-needed investment, participating restaurants agree to provide 500 free meals to those in need — typically over a 10 week period — and meet progressive workplace standards, including conducting a self-assessment of the gender and racial breakdown of staff who interact with patrons and staff who cook meals and clean dishes in the back of the restaurant. Restaurants are also required to participate in a racial and gender equity training within nine months and pledge to pay all employees a standard living wage by 2025.
High Road Kitchens hopes these measures will help reframe the traditional hierarchy of the restaurant industry, where higher-paid servers and bartenders are largely white and male and lower-paid cooks and dishwashers are largely women of color.
“We are subsidizing some restaurants and not others to make it through the crisis,” said Andy Hall, chief impact officer at the San Diego Workforce Partnership, the city’s work-force board, which is a nonprofit. The more equitable employment practices required by High Road Kitchens, he added, make those restaurants “better positioned to lead the industry in San Diego on the other side of the Covid-19 crisis.”
One of the program’s biggest challenges has been connecting with people who need free and discounted meals.
“That’s not because of the lack of people who fit that description,” said Knab. “It’s because none of us in the restaurants are professionally adept at doing that kind of outreach. We’re always looking for people that want to pay for food.”
Sanchez estimates that Super Cocina gives away about two free family-style meals a day — each meal feeds four people — but he’d like to grow that number. He has reached out to local nonprofits to try and connect with people in need. The City Heights neighborhood where the restaurant is located has a high population of immigrants, refugees, and low-income people, he says, and many nonprofits are active in the area. He hopes local charities will help direct people in need toward free meals at Super Cocina.
Sanchez is also planning a second marketing blitz on social media to attract more donors and paying customers. “I think it’s just getting the word out. We can definitely handle the amount [of business] and keep it going,” he said.
It’s essential that participating restaurants do this kind of outreach, Knab said. “We are clear that if they don’t put effort into the program, it won’t succeed,” he said.
The program is mostly self-directed, and Knab said results have varied. Ponce’s Mexican Kitchen, a San Diego restaurant owned by the restaurant group Knab works for, has found such success with the program that they’ve now pledged to deliver 2,600 free meals to the community — well over the required 500.
“We’ve knocked it out of the park,” Knab said “There are one or two restaurants in the 13 that I would say struck out at the plate.” To encourage more success, the staff at High Road Kitchens now helps restaurants improve their marketing to gain traction.
As High Road Kitchens fine-tunes its approach during the California pilot, it has benefited from existing relationships with local governments, businesses, and philanthropists. By tapping a charity to spread the word about free meals or relying on the local work-force board to quickly devise Covid-19 safety training programs, High Road Kitchens has relied on the existing expertise within communities.
“I think it was Milton Friedman who said the ideas that get used in a crisis are the ones that are lying around,” said Hall at the San Diego Workforce Partnership. When it comes to High Road Kitchens, “a lot of the pieces were lying around.”
(The Chronicle of Higher Education, the organization that publishes the Chronicle of Philanthropy, has received a loan under the Paycheck Protection Program.)
