Gold Coast restaurant Café Sophie helping feed asylum seekers in Chicago
By JAMAICA PONDER
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CHICAGO (WBBM) — A Gold Coast restaurant is using its kitchen for good. Café Sophie has partnered with a Chicago alderman to serve 100 meals to migrants once a week, and they’re encouraging other restaurants to join in on their effort.
“I don’t see enough people using food as a tool to help, and so hopefully we can show people that it’s not that hard,” said David Pisor, founder of the newly formed Etta Collective, a spin-off of his previous restaurant group. “This version of my company, we want to give back to the community.”
He teamed up with Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez, who represents the 25th Ward – which includes parts of the Pilsen, Greektown, Chinatown, Little Village, University Village, and Little Italy neighborhoods – where hundreds of migrants are currently being housed.
“This has been a community effort, an emergency shelter that was set up in only a few days,” Sigcho-Lopez said.
Together, they organized the distribution of over 100 bagged lunches, all made in the kitchen of Etta Collective’s latest venture, Café Sophie in Gold Coast.
“There’s an opportunity here, where we all are making so much food every day. If there’s a little bit left over, or we can craft a program where we can help out, why not?” Pisor said.
They plan to keep bringing lunches to migrants, once a week, until the middle of June.
“I think this serves as a model of what can be done when all our community organizations here locally come together to address this humanitarian crisis as such,” Sigcho-Lopez said.
They’re working to get more restaurants on board, to make sure there’s help coming from every direction.
“There wasn’t anybody big that was helping on the food front, and we thought we could start that process. So we’re beginning the engagement today, and hopefully it goes on for a while, until we can kind of get people into a better spot,” Pisor said.
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