The idea was kicked off locally by a Oct. 24 social media post from Tony & Alba’s Pizza and Pasta, a family-run restaurant in San José.
Tony & Alba’s is offering a free pizza or pasta with carrots, fruit and a drink to children accompanied by a parent with an EBT card. “Children need to be fed!” the restaurant’s account posted on Instagram. Parents’ meals will be discounted.
“Was it Mother Teresa who said you don’t have to do great things, just little things? Well this is our little thing,” Tony & Alba’s owner Al Vallorz said in a video on social media. “I hope it’s a short-lived program, because that means [SNAP] gets funded. But until it does, it’s up to us.”
Other restaurants quickly followed suit. The popular food truck Al Pastor Papi, newly opened in a Union Square brick-and-mortar, is offering free burritos to CalFresh recipients in November.
“If we can provide a meal once a week for a family that’s going to be affected, I think that’s helpful on both ends,” chef and owner Miguel Escobedo told KQED. “We can’t survive as a business without our community, so it’s our responsibility to answer the call when our community is in need, however that might look like.”
In the Bay Area, Alameda County has the highest share — 176,133 — of people using CalFresh. And Oakland’s Tee Tran, who owns Monster Phở — another restaurant offering meals to young CalFresh recipients — knows about food insecurity firsthand.
When his family arrived in the East Bay as refugees from Vietnam, Tran says his mother worked multiple jobs to put food on the table. Even still, he says, “We were on welfare, we were on food stamps.”
Tran remembers waiting in line with his brothers for free food, and feels fortunate that they had access to that resource. “I didn’t think even twice about this,” he says of the decision to offer free meals to CalFresh recipients ages 12 and under.
“Financially it’s been difficult to be a restaurant in this economy,” says Tran. “But there are people who are worse off than us.”
