Kloof café reopens as lockdown soup kitchen
The staff will work in small teams on a rotational basis to earn a daily cash wage and cook large pots of vegetable soup with either chicken or beef added for much-needed protein.
DURING the lockdown, vulnerable communities across the highway area have battled as schools are closed and, along with this, the school meals came to an end.
The Bellevue Café team is ready to tackle these challenges and make a difference.
“We are extremely excited to be involved in this initiative. We have a wonderful kitchen facility and team that is standing idle. Our waiter team has been hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic as the bulk of their earnings come from tips, so this is a wonderful way to assist them as well.
“We are so fortunate to be able to make a difference during such trying times and we relish the opportunity to be involved in something so positive in such a negative time of our lives,” said founder and owner of Bellevue Café, Guy Cluver.
As of Tuesday, 28 April, the restaurant’s kitchen will be turned into an operational soup kitchen to provide for the poor.
The staff will work in small teams on a rotational basis to earn a daily cash wage and cook large pots of vegetable soup with either chicken or beef added for much-needed protein.
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Since the beginning of the national lockdown in South Africa, no restaurant has been able to open for business and they were forced to close and send their staff home. When the country enters stage 4 of the lock down, restaurants will be allowed to reopen for the delivery of food only, before an 8pm curfew.
The soup will fill 5l buckets, generously donated by PailPac Pty Ltd. in New Germany.
The Willowton Group in Pietermaritzburg has donated rice for the initiative. Each family will receive a bucket of soup and a bucket of rice.
The meals will be donated to the Zero2Five Trust, a Kloof-based non-profit organisation. It has established a large scale network and nutritional programmes since 2014.
Zero2Five set up feeding schemes, early childhood development education programmes and community development projects in informal settlements across KZN and in the Eastern Cape.
The Zero2Five beneficiaries include crèches, after school programmes and community centres. Under normal operating conditions, the various programmes support up to 17 000 children at school, every week day.
“We strongly feel that we cannot let the children on our programmes down during lockdown and have restructured our operations to enable us to feed these children and their families at their homes.
“The response from our long standing donors and the public was great and we are delighted to enter this partnership with Bellevue Café, which will allow us to provide cooked meals instead of dry food items,” said the Zero2Five CEO, Julika Falconer.
The restaurant’s waitering team, under the supervision of head chef, Branden Huysamer, will be responsible for cooking the meals.The goal is to provide 100 families with soup and rice, every day from Monday to Friday.
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