Brooklyn Restaurant now serves hospital workers, unemployed restaurant workers and the unhoused.
Flip Biddelman and his partners had just celebrated the first anniversary of the opening of their restaurant in Brooklyn, an all-day counter-service spot called Gertie. The team was looking to keep the momentum going with a new menu that accompanied a new head chef, a switch to table service, and a growing profile from positive reviews.
Then COVID-19 ripped through New York closing down just about every business. With no income, the owners of Gertie had to lay off their employees, at least temporarily, once extended unemployment was passed. But instead of waiting it out and just hoping for the best, Biddelman and the rest of his partners wanted to be on the front lines.
“We closed down the restaurant, we immediately were like, how can we do something that could be helpful, something that could really contribute during this crazy time?” Biddelman remembers. As a native New Yorker, the city’s unprecedented struggles hit very close to home, so inaction was not an option.
So the Gertie team hunted down and applied for grants. They eventually landed one from a project run by Chef Edward Lee, a James Beard-award winning restaurateur. The grant allowed them to hire back some employees to produce hot meals and boxed ingredients to go for up to 300 unemployed hospitality workers per day. They also included essential items like toothbrushes, hygiene items, toilet paper, and pantry staples.
Just as things continued to get worse around New York and the rest of the country, the virus took its toll on the Gertie family. When the father of the restaurant’s first head chef passed, they began to reassess the risks.
As Biddelman explains, serving 300 people a day wasn’t safe enough to justify his employees’ exposure, so they pivoted and started to fundraise locally. The generosity of New Yorkers and non-profit facilitators like City Harvest let them provide assistance to another group of worthy workers: hospital employees.
“Four four days a week, we were dropping off 300 to 400 meals a day at various hospitals around the city,” Biddelman says. “We couldn’t be more thrilled about the population we were helping, and on top of that, it allowed us to keep staff members employed.”
As hospitals began to get more help from non-profits, Gertie transitioned again to help another needy population — now, the restaurant is feeding hundreds of homeless New Yorkers every single day. In fact, Gertie’s staff is now pulling double duty, keeping up their charity work as the restaurant partially reopened for sidewalk dining.
It’s hard to predict the future for any business right now, let alone a restaurant, but Biddelman says that feeding the community is going to remain a priority.
“As long as there’s a need, we want to be there.”
You can thank Flip and his team for their work here.
