A grassroots effort
Houston restaurants rally to take food to victims of Montgomery and WallerCounty fires
You'd better believe that when the Houston foodie community rallies around a cause, by golly, it rallies.
And while Texas continues to burn hot, the calm, cool heads behind food establishments citywide have banded together to fight the fires that they can — with grassroots efforts.
"The restaurant community in Houston needs to do something," said Chris Shepherd, former Catalan chef and current Underbelly creator. "These are our neighbors, our farmers — they're in our backyard."
The collective culinary conscience simply wouldn't allow these able hands to sit idly by.
So Shepherd and chef Lyle Bento of Party Fowl and The Modular did what they do best — they cooked up a scheme.
"[On Friday], we're going to roll up to Montgomery and Waller Counties and belly up where we can," said Shepherd. "We started off taking a food truck up there and handing stuff out, and now Central Market's given us pallets of things to take."
But that's not all.
With other restaurants like Stella Sola, Brennan's, and Haven — among many others — throwing their perishable goods into the ring of fire, Shepherd, Bento, and their industry buddies are doing so much more than they originally imagined they could.
"The restaurants are donating hot food boxes, and the kids at the Art Institute will be making sandwiches to put in the cooler," said Shepherd. "We've had trucks donated and chocolate milk for kids. Whatever companies want to donate food, we'll take the food trucks up there, and fry things and bake things."
Now they just have to find a place to drop everything off for distribution.
But Friday's Good Samaritan efforts are very much a work in progress. The details aren't set in stone just yet.
In fact, if you're a restaurant, food vendor, or can contribute supplies or equipment to Friday's efforts, you're invited to meet up at 13 Celsius at 4 p.m. on Thursday afternoon.
"We want to find out what restaurants can do food for us, and who wants to be involved in this," Shepherd said. "All restaurants and industry people that want to be a part of what we're doing on Friday should come."
Throughout our continuing coverage of the wildfires ravaging our state, plenty of you have been asking, "How can I help?"
Well, folks, here's your answer.