Foodie & The Beast from Home: April 26, 2020

Rightly so, this week’s Foodie and the Beast focuses on the restaurant and local food community’s varied responses to the Coronavirus mess. We’re joined by Neighborhood Restaurant Group’s CEO, Michael Babin, whose 20 area restaurants almost magically pivoted to serving take-out and delivery when the stay-at-home order came out, and then further transformed all of NRG into Neighborhood Provisions, an online destination offering a great selection of comfort meals, ready-to-cook foods, pantry items, wine and beer (and, in DC, liquor), all delivered straight to the consumer’s front door – ya gotta hear it to believe it. Just as quickly, Anna Valero and her Hook Hall team also pivoted to create Hook Hall Helps.com, DC’S first hospitality industry relief program to address the collection of food donations and create the daily dinner meals for out-of-work hospitality industry colleagues.    Legendary DC restaurateur, Ruth Gresser, of Pizzaria Paradiso and Birreria Paradiso fame, also came on to tell how she turned on a dime to help feed hungry hospitality workers and members of the community with her “10,000 Pizza’s” program. And Sam Sgori and Sara Abdel-Rahim of Tables Without Borders joined us to promote their GoFundMe page supporting a program where refugee chefs cook meals to support clients of Ayuda DC which organization provides essential legal, social, and language services for vulnerable immigrants in the DC metropolitan area. To listen to the full episode, click here.