Restaurants team up with Hawks, State Farm to feed health care workers

ATLANTA — A partnership between three restaurants, the Atlanta Hawks and State Farm is helping to feed about 1,000 health care workers on the front lines of the battle against COVID-19.

It's also a way to bring back restaurant employees who were recently laid off.

Channel 2′s Matt Johnson was in Midtown, where Miller Union, Storica Fresco and Forza Storico are now making 4,000 meals weekly to delivery to six metro Atlanta hospitals. The deliveries started Friday.

Employees said the initiative was a way to tackle a couple of problems all at once.

At Miller Union, a couple hundred bags show just the beginning of the new effort to feed Atlanta's heath care heroes.

"We don't have customers, we just have an assembly line," said Miller Union's Steven Satterfield. "The fact that we're able to engage I think 75% of our employees is pretty fantastic."

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Executive Chef Michael Patrick, of Storico Fresco and Forza Storico, said it was important to keep the ingredients locally-sourced.

"The idea was to try to get some farmers back to work, back to seeding, keeping their product in rotation," Patrick said.

It’s a rotation that now includes Emory hospitals but could expand to other hospitals.

Hawks CEO Steve Koonin said he hopes the number of hospitals they serve will grow.

"I'm hopeful in the next couple of weeks we double, triple the amount of restaurants and the amount of hospitals that we're serving," Koonin said.

For now, the restaurants are just happy to have customers again -- some of the most important customers in metro Atlanta."

“These incredibly talented and hard-working individuals that are saving lives in the hospital,” Satterfield said. “All those good feels is just like a great way to get through this hard time.”

The initiative will be funded for at least a month.

Restaurants want people to know they're still open for take out Channel 2's Nicole Carr found some some usually busy spots were feeling the impact of coronavirus.

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