'Hibernating' Harlem Restaurants Feed Workers During Closure

HARLEM, NY — A pair of Harlem restaurants that closed temporarily after the city's newest round of dining restrictions have been converted into makeshift food pantries to feed the neighborhood's restaurant workers.

Italian eatery Lido and pan-Asian restaurant Bixi, both owned by Susannah Koteen, closed their doors in late December and early January, seeking to wait out a pandemic winter that got even bleaker following the shutdown of indoor dining.

Though they are only "hibernating," the closures meant that about 50 workers between the two restaurants were suddenly out of work.

"I feel terrible," Koteen said. "Some of my people aren’t able to get unemployment benefits, so they’re just home not making money."

Koteen got in touch with the nonprofit Meals For Good, whose CEO, Cathy Nonas, reached out to Indivisible Harlem. The trio began to raise money to buy groceries for the newly unemployed workers.

After putting the word out to other shuttered restaurants along Frederick Douglass Boulevard, the group held its first distribution Friday at Lido, where 22 restaurant workers and their families got three bags each of fresh groceries, filled with eggs, milk, canola oil, produce, canned foods and other essentials they had asked for.

The group is planning to hold the distributions at least once a month until indoor dining resumes.

"We plan, as a neighborhood, as that proverbial village, to continue to service this community as the need grows," Nonas wrote in an email.

To donate to the effort, visit mealsforgood.org/take-action.