The programs won’t provide enough to let restaurants rehire laid off workers, but they might keep the lights on

It’s simple enough an idea: Restaurants all over the Bay Area are closing outright or experiencing massive layoffs as they shift to delivery and takeout. At the same time, more and more Bay Area residents — including the newly unemployed — are dealing with food insecurity. To provide some relief on both fronts, why not pay the restaurants to provide free meals for the most vulnerable people in the community?

That’s the basic approach that Italian hot spot Che Fico is taking in San Francisco, with a free meals program that has largely been subsidized by wealthy tech donors. It’s also the basis for SF New Deal, a program administered by Three Babes Bakeshop’s Lenore Estrada — and funded by an initial $1 million donation from the CEO of Twitch — that likewise pays restaurants to provide meals for people in need.

Now, with the launch of two similar initiatives this week, one in Sonoma County and one in Oakland, it’s officially a trend: In Sonoma, John Jordan, the owner of Healdsburg’s Jordan Winery, and his foundation just cut a $150,000 check to the nonprofit Sonoma Family Meal — an amount that, combined with another $100,000 contribution from the county, could keep 10 to 12 struggling restaurants open for as long as two to three months by paying them to prepare meals for Sonoma County residents in need, says Heather Irwin, the organization’s founder.

In Oakland, the payment processing company Marqeta has set up a similar fund, called the Oaklanders Supporting Oaklanders Initiative, that will, to start out, pay the soul food restaurant Brown Sugar Kitchen to provide a few hundred meals a week to nonprofits that support foster youths, families in need, and the homeless.

Founded by Irwin, whose day job is as the Santa Rosa Press Democrat’s dining editor. Sonoma Family Meal originally started as an organization that fed people displaced by the Tubbs and Kincaid fires in wine country. The COVID-19 crisis, of course, presents a totally different set of challenges, but the basic idea — of mobilizing restaurants to provide food for local nonprofits, which then distribute it to the elderly and other vulnerable communities — is the same.

In this case, Irwin says, the idea came out of a conversation with Single Thread chef Kyle Connaughton, whose Healdsburg fine dining restaurant piloted Sonoma Family Meal’s new program with 200 daily meals, each meant to feed four people, last week. Higher-profile restaurants like Connaughton’s, as well as Mateo’s Cocina Latina, and PizZando — all three of which are taking part in the program — will raise money through their own network of donors; Sonoma Family Meal will just facilitate the process.

The $250,000 fund, on the other hand, will go towards supporting less well-resourced restaurants and catering businesses — the initial crop includes Gerard’s Paella, the Girl & the Fig, and Chaco’s Catering, paying out $8 for every meal a restaurant provides. A small restaurant like the Girl and the Fig, for instance, will make 800 of those meals this week, for a total payment of $6,400.

At those rates, the initiative should help give participating restaurants just enough of a steady revenue stream to keep their lights on with a skeleton crew — an important thing, given how difficult it is for places to reopen once they’ve closed, Irwin says. But for restaurants that have laid off most of their hourly workers, it won’t be nearly enough for them to staff up again. “This isn’t going to be able to keep a restaurant with its whole staff. Absolutely not,” Irwin says.

For its part, the John Jordan Foundation is hoping to solicit another $150,000 in donations, matching its own contribution — an amount that could increase the number of participating restaurants to 20. Moving forward, restaurants that want to join the program will need to submit a bid, Irwin explains.

Likewise, in Oakland, Marqeta has set up an initial fund of $50,000 and, starting on March 31, it’ll be asking other local companies to contribute as well, in order to expand the reach of the program beyond a single restaurant. Tanya Holland, the chef at Brown Sugar Kitchen, says she’ll start out cooking 250 or 300 meals a week through the initiative — simple meals that might feature roast chicken or Creole meatloaf, she says. Holland, too, has laid off all of the restaurant’s hourly workers, and the Oaklanders Supporting Oaklanders program isn’t going to be enough to allow her to hire anyone back.

Still, she says, the extra several thousand dollars a week will go a long way toward just allowing her to stay open at all, which is important. “If your restaurant sits empty, it’s almost like you’re a person and you’re not moving — the soul dies,” she says. “This is an opportunity to keep the soul of the restaurant going.”

The idea that restaurants might be mobilized to feed people in need — and that this, in turn, might provide a kind of salvation for the restaurant industry itself — isn’t, of course, unique to the Bay Area. José Andres, the celebrated chef perhaps best known for his World Central Kitchen organization, which mobilizes chefs to feed people impacted by natural disasters (and, recently, passengers aboard the Grand Princess cruise ship that docked in Oakland due to a COVID-19 outbreak), recently urged the federal government to pump billions of dollars into Depression-era Works Progress Administration-style program that would convert restaurants all over America into community kitchens to feed people in need.

“Today an army of American cooks stands ready to serve our most vulnerable citizens, at a time when those cooks are themselves in desperate need of support,” Andrés writes in an op-ed for the New York Times. The Bay Area programs aren’t nearly as all-encompassing as that, but they may provide a way forward for at least a handful of restaurants. “It’s just basically a lifeline right now,” Irwin says. “It’s the best we can do as a lifeline.”