Hundreds of lucky Stanford Hospital workers will be eating smoked trout and goat cheese salad from an award-winning Menlo Park restaurant trying to keep its staff in the kitchen, 6 feet apart, instead of at home.

Flea Street restaurant is preparing 200 meals a day and dropping them off at the hospital. Regular restaurant diners and other supporters have kicked in $50,000 to get the Meals of Gratitude program going.

Longtime restaurateur Jesse Cool of Flea Street started it after she had to shut her dining room and lay off two dozen workers. Most of them have been brought back and the restaurant is also packing up its high-end chow ($40 halibut cheeks, $15 carrot cake and $18 lavender lemon drops) as takeout for regulars.

A different hospital department gets the meals every day, to prevent a mad rush and toilet paper-style panic when the Flea Street truck arrives.

Cool said the generosity of her customers during the pandemic “makes me want to cry.”

After thinking it over, Cool realized that the restaurant gift certificates that some diners have been buying to support their favorite hash houses around the Bay Area could backfire.

“As generous as people are, if they all come in with their gift cards when you reopen and don’t spend any money, it’s a problem,” she said.

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A San Francisco magician found out you can’t make sponge balls appear in a kid’s hand when the kid isn’t there.

Veteran magician Ash K. performed his very first kids’ birthday party magic show via videoconference the other afternoon for 20 children who were watching from 20 different homes while celebrating the seventh birthday of their pal.

Ash K. said he cut his normal 45-minute show to 15 minutes because of all the tricks that don’t translate from live performance to a video screen.

“You can’t have a kid participate with you onstage,” he said. “I like to make sponge balls jump from my hand to their hand. I like to have a kid hold the rope when I cut it and then restore it. I like to have a kid hold the linking rings. Obviously that doesn’t work.”

Instead, during the online show he made a bottle appear out of the air, made red lights glow on his fingertips and made another bottle keep changing places inside of two tubes. He also made balls disappear. Something else that disappeared was most of his fee.

“Usually I charge $325 for a kid’s birthday show,” he said, “but for this I felt I could only charge $85.”

For the first time, hand sanitizer is going into the takeout dinner packages being handed out Sunday evening from the front of SS Peter and Paul’s Church in North Beach.

Volunteers distributing the meals from two ironing boards set up on the sidewalk will be in masks and gloves. That’s a first, too.

It’s part of the church’s monthly “Dinner for the Homeless and Poor” program. The meal boxes also will contain something else that comes in handy — a pair of socks.

Northstar is among the Sierra ski resorts finding itself with extra food in its warehouse. A resort truck delivered much of it to the Tahoe Truckee Unified School District for its grab-and-go meals program. District parent spokeswoman Kelli Twomey said the district was “so appreciative of Northstar’s truckload of donations.”

Rock fans are helping spread the word on social distancing by doctoring some of their favorite album covers to reflect the protocols for giving people their space.

Activista, a creative agency in Los Angeles, launched a project on Instagram called 6 Feet Covers that depicts familiar artwork by artists like the Beatles, Queen, Kiss, Blondie, U2, Fleetwood Mac and others, rearranging the pictures to depict the band members giving each other plenty of room to roam.

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Its modified version of the "Abbey Road" sleeve, for example, takes John, Paul, George and Ringo out of the famous London crosswalk and disperses them along the street; while “The Joshua Tree” separates the Bono, the Edge and the other two deep into the desert. Others are getting in on the act, too, offering their own versions of cut-and-paste album art. See the rest on the Activista Instagram feed.

Chronicle Staff Writer Aidin Vaziri contributed to this report.

Steve Rubenstein is a staff writer at The San Francisco Chronicle. E-mail: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com

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