- The Eleven Madison Truck will feed communities in food-insecure districts in the Bronx and Brooklyn.
- In collaboration with Rethink Food,
Eleven Madison Park will offer 2,000 free meals per week. - The truck will offer meals that the restaurant provided to first responders during the pandemic, Bloomberg reported.
Staff of New York's famed Eleven Madison Park restaurant will operate a food truck to feed underserved communities starting April 12.
The thrice Michelin-starred dining restaurant will provide 2,000 free meals per week, it said Friday, as an ongoing collaboration with the nonprofit Rethink Food to feed food-insecure districts in Brooklyn and the Bronx.
Rethink Food is a New York-based non-profit that was co-founded by Eleven Madison Park's co-owner and Michelin-starred chef Daniel Humm.
"The Eleven Madison Truck offers a mobile extension of the restaurant's commissary kitchen, distributing meals made with the same produce and ingredients utilized at the restaurant on-site in an effort to reduce food insecurity in the communities that need it most," the restaurant said.
The truck will offer meals that the restaurant has been providing to first responders and soup kitchens during the pandemic. These meals include jerk chicken with roasted vegetables and grain bowls, Bloomberg first reported on Friday.
"We had been brainstorming different ways to make the restaurant part of the community and get staff engaged beyond making meals and pushing them out of the door, and then Daniel called me and was, like, 'Let's do a food truck," co-founder and chief executive officer of Rethink Matt Jozwiak told Bloomberg.
Eleven Madison Park will prepare the meals from its leftover ingredients and donated products. The restaurant will also prioritize working with suppliers who support the program, according to Bloomberg.
"We're going to ask them to give us some product for free for Rethink, we'll select our suppliers based on that," Humm told Bloomberg.
Operating the truck will cost around $16,000 per month without the food, according to Bloomberg.
These costs will be partially covered by the Eleven Madison Park diners. For every $275 home-dinner meal kit bought from the fine-dining restaurant, the Eleven Madison Truck will offer 10 free meals, according to the statement.
More donations will go to the truck once the restaurant reopens for indoor dining later in 2021, Eleven Madison Park added.
The restaurant closed its doors in March 2020 when the pandemic hit the country and COVID-19 cases surged. In response to the pandemic, Jozwiak agreed with Humm to use Eleven Madison Park's kitchen as a commissary kitchen with the goal to prepare 250,000 meals throughout COVID-19.
Jozwiak, who is also a former cook at the restaurant, previously said in a blog post that Rethink prepares food for 12 community centers in New York.
Rethink Food alongside Humm and his staff served up to 3,000 meals a day for frontline workers and underserved communities in New York, Insider previously reported.