“Service! started about two weeks after the pandemic shut restaurants down. By nature, chefs don’t know how to sit still, and everyone was at home trying to figure things out. Matt Heaggans, Letha Pugh, and I got together, and we said, ‘We can wait for other people to do something, or we can do the one thing we know how to do. Let’s cook.’

Initially, we cooked for people out of work in the service industry, and we put out almost 12,000 meals in the first eight weeks of the pandemic. Most people who work in the food industry are food insecure, but they at least get one meal at work, maybe some leftovers. But that was gone, and then their landlords were knocking on their door, and AEP wanted their money.

So, we got some seed money, and the ECDI gave us a kitchen to work out of, and we just started doing the thing to stay occupied. We didn’t want to think about our own problems, our own restaurants shutting down.

A lot of the people in the industry who had shut down their restaurants and had food that was going to go bad started dropping things off. Vendors who had back stock sitting started dropping things off. Farmers came by to drop off extra produce. We just had a lot of community support with those first meals, and then word spread, and people started sending us checks.

We used the money to help service workers with their utilities, rent, or child care, to help them stay on their feet while they were waiting to get more work.

The organization grew from there. Then we were invited to take over the cafeteria at the county courthouse, and that was the inception of Café Overlook. The cafe helped us see the true void there was in the hospitality industry. Many workers had left the industry, and we knew we needed to start training people to rebuild it. So, we put together a curriculum and brought in people who had barriers to work and wanted to learn a new skill.

This is the only industry that has not been professionalized, and it doesn’t get the respect it’s due. Everybody uses the hospitality industry. Everybody. Whether you’re at the zoo using the concession stands or parking valet. You can’t escape us. But society doesn’t recognize all the people who take care of those services. We just make sure you are taken care of.

One of the reasons it’s like this is that it’s an industry that’s open to anyone. You don’t need any formal education. We’ll take somebody who’s just passing through and has other plans, somebody who’s in a pinch, and then others who this is their profession, their career. I’m not going to grow up and get a real job, like, this is it.

It’s really important for us to change that narrative. If everybody could cook, and if everybody wanted to do their own dishes, and turn on the vibey music and light the candles at home, then they could do it. But they don’t. People come out to eat, so the work our professionals do is valuable.”

Sangeeta Lakhani is the Executive Director and Founder of Service!, a social enterprise organization that operates Café Overlook and is soon opening a new restaurant, The Line, on October 8, which will be a full-service restaurant, workforce development program, and community gathering place where hospitality professionals can advance their careers while creating experiences that strengthen our community.