Down on their luck hospitality workers are getting the VIP treatment in Brooklyn, thanks to a pair of generous restaurateurs who are serving up gourmet meals and handing out free groceries and other essentials amid the Big Apple’s coronavirus crisis.
For four days a week, Nate Adler and Flip Biddelman use their Williamsburg restaurant Gertie as a part-time soup kitchen for laid off workers — keeping most of their own staff gainfully employed in the process.
“The program is specifically geared to helping hospitality workers. Obviously 90-plus percent of hospitality workers are out of a job right now. I could not think of a better example of a win-win situation,” Adler, 30, told The Post.
“We get to pay employees to be here, and we’re servicing the community. We’re all benefiting from it. It’s a pretty amazing thing.”
The workers can come to the Grand Street restaurant Tuesday-Friday between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. for dinner and essentials, including bags of quinoa, bags of coffee, pasta, and even hard to find toilet paper.
Last week they served up braised chicken, white beans and greens, marinated beets and cucumbers and sent each meal off with a cookie donated from nearby Milk Bar.
They have enough to make 300 meals a day, thanks to a grant from celebrity chef Edward Lee’s Restaurant Relief Program, and whatever goes uneaten is taken to the Woodhull Medical Center in Bedford-Stuyvesant for hospital workers.
Ever since coronavirus forced restaurants to shut down dine-in service, Adler and Biddelman, 32, had to fire nearly all of their staff as they scraped by with takeout business.
“That was one of the hardest things we had to do, to tell our staff that we don’t have any shifts for them and that they should file for unemployment,” Biddelman said.
But since starting the soup kitchen, they were able to hire back five kitchen workers and four front of house staffers — almost their entire team.
“It’s been such a relief,” Biddelman said.
Jovanni Luna, a former Gertie bartender who was hired back to help with the project, couldn’t agree more.
“I loved all the people I worked with, the space, everything about it. I felt like I was settling down, finally figuring out my life, and then this happened and disrupted everything,” the 30-year-old said.
“There has definitely been this constant thought in my mind of ‘what can I do with limited resources to help out the rest of my friends, help out those that are in need?’ If I had money, I would be donating to people and giving out supplies. At least this way, working here, I can help those that are in need.”
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