Memphis Chef Gives Back to His Adopted City

When the pandemic struck, he moved quickly. He recalls, “We felt like we had a pretty good plan. I paid attention to what was going on in the world and how it was shutting down whole countries. I knew that business had been getting bad, and we felt that people were already making the decision not to eat out. So we were the first restaurants in Memphis to close. We shut down on a Monday, although the official order didn’t come out until Friday.” Even with his quick action and thoughtful decisions, English found himself questioning his future. “It’s crazy stressful to change your business model while you’re still trying to imagine it. I’m good at cooking food and managing logistics, but we had to cut our staff from 65 to 8 on the day we closed for dining in,” he explains. “Somewhere in the first couple of weeks of trying to do carryout I started to ask myself how we could support our community and keep our jobs.”

After some introspection, English came up with a viable model to do both. He recalls, “We figured if we could get people to donate $400, we’d throw in another hundred so we could cook for first line responders, out-of-work hospitality professionals and homeless people.” The chef ran the effort out of his third property, Fino’s, a beloved Memphis Midtown institution that he rescued by purchasing it after it had closed in late 2018. Working out of the deli’s kitchen, English and his team delivered just shy of 16,000 sandwiches to hospitals and relief centers over 2½ months time.

English depended on faith that the donations would keep flowing in to keep the sandwiches going out the door. He recalls, “We have an amazing community! They kept it going for a good long while thanks to some amazing partners. BMW funded two full weeks of lunches, and there were just a lot of people that came out of the woodwork.”

English is happy that he was able to help so many people directly, rather than working with food banks, for example. He explains, “They already had a ton of people supporting those measures. We felt like we had a really specific way that we could help in the manner we did. In fact, there were some groups that came to us to try to give us money to do things for people, and we declined it so that they could give it to other people that could use some support right now, other restaurants.”