When survival is paramount, maintaining perspective can be difficult.
“I was like, 'Oh my God, I’m going have three restaurants that are never going to reopen,'" Daniel Serfer said.
Serfer’s plight is not unique. As the owner of Blue Collar in Miami, he and his employees are struggling.
“Across all three of my restaurants, we employ 55 people, so 55 people were without a job," he said.
Serfer's employees are furloughed, but they're still cooking.
Frontline Foods is a national organization that pays restaurants like Serfer's to cook meals that are then donated to healthcare workers.
Shauna Kaufman of Frontline Foods says 21 restaurants already delivered over 4,300 meals to 12 hospitals across South Florida since it started last week.
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Serfer, like the others, gets paid $15-20 a plate. At 300 dishes every four days, that’s nearly $10,000 a week, which is enough for him to rehire 15 workers.
“We are so overwhelmed," he said. "We feel like we’re really appreciated.”
These workers make the lives of our country’s most vital workers just a little easier and their perspectives a little brighter.
“In Italy they have a saying, one hand washes the other. So there’s a unique beauty to what’s going on where the whole world has been forced to stop and given this time so what you do with that time is very telling of a person and what will put us on the other side.”
Since it started three weeks ago, Frontline Foods has expanded to more than 30 cities in the country. It’s raised more than $1 million in donations and delivered more than 27,000 meals.
