How One New Restaurant Is Feeding Coronavirus Frontline Heroes
LONG BEACH, CA — Noble Bird Rotisserie was a newbie on the Long Beach restaurant scene, open for mere weeks, when the coronavirus hit, bringing with it clampdowns on in-house dining.
Owner Sidney Price huddled with her two dozen or so employees as they absorbed the takeout-and-delivery-only mandates that upended the food-service industry statewide. Her business was positioned better than most to absorb to-go regulations, and it promoted its "What the Cluck?!" family-meal kits.
Now, along with navigating her own eatery through COVID-19 fallout, Price is spearheading a fundraising campaign to give back to first responders and medical crews battling the pandemic, and she is inviting locals to participate.
Noble Bird's "Feed Our Frontline Heroes Long Beach" launched this month on GoFundMe with a $10,000 goal to provide and deliver meals to hospital workers, along with assisting two local, frontline families per week with groceries.
The 10K goal (equivalent to 1,000 meals) was hit within 10 days, which moved Price to tears, and she set a new fundraising target — $20,000.
"The generosity of so many individuals is emotional and energizing," she said.
Since the campaign began, Price and her team have delivered scores of pre-packaged chicken dinners — complete with handwritten notes of thanks — to fire stations and three area hospitals, the VA Long Beach Healthcare, Memorial Care - Long Beach and St. Mary Medical Center.
"Meal drop-offs have become our team’s favorite part of the day — carefully crafting each dish, penning handwritten notes of thanks and putting all the love we can into them," Price said.
The fundraiser also each week is sponsoring two frontline families with a week's worth of groceries and meals. One of the first chosen, a newly engaged couple from Long Beach — a St. Mary emergency nurse and an Orange County firefighter — was nominated by the nurse's mother.
"The stress is already high, and it's going to get so much worse, especially with both her and her fiance both in first responder roles," the woman said. "I know not having to think about meal preparations for a week will be so appreciated."
Community nominations for a deserving frontline family are welcome and can be emailed to noblebirdrotisserie.com.
And the fundraising effort has proved a boon to more than just the hardworking, meal recipients, Price noted.
"As a restaurant, these meals allow us to continue to offer our teammates hours. We were able to hire a teammate back," Price said. "We are able to purchase more chicken from our beloved chicken farm, Pasturebird Farms. We can further support the farmers we get our produce from. Our favorite delivery driver gets an extra day of delivering to us. It is crazy that one meal affects so many people on the restaurant side of things. "
As for how the Noble Bird business is faring on to-go alone, Price said it is "going OK."
"It really is one day at a time," she said. "And it takes our team's every effort to make it to the next day, but we are dedicated and determined to come out on the other side. If we survive this, we can survive anything."
To contribute to Noble Bird's frontline mission, follow this link. Or click here to order meals for delivery or curbside pick-up at the restaurant, located at 6460 E. Pacific Coast Hwy. at 2nd and PCH.
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This article originally appeared on the Long Beach Patch
