SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (KRON) – While many restaurants are closed in San Francisco and their employees are out of work, they’re still offering help to those on the front lines.

Chef and owner of Cockscomb, Chris Cosentino, and his staff prepared meals for ER’s in three San Francisco hospitals on Tuesday.

Now, he says it’s something San Francisco restaurant owners are banning together to do regularly.

“Hospitality means to take care of people right? And they’re taking care of people so we have to take care of the people who are taking care of people,” Cosentino said.

Cosentino says now is the time to help others, especially those fighting the coronavirus on the front lines.

On Tuesday, he and his staff at the Cockscomb prepared 125 meals for emergency rooms across three hospitals – SF General, UCSF on Parnassus and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. 

“Kinda turned into a GoFundMe situation, so he’s ultimately just covering the cost of the food for the restaurants, just basic costs of the food, theres no profit involved ultimately and its just getting good, quality food to doctors and nurses that are treating patients of all kinds. Whether its somebody who may think they have COVID-19 or someone who’s being entered into the emergency room because they cut themselves or they fell down and they’re inundated right now and just need food,” Cosentino said.

Cosentino says an organizer reached out to coordinate deliveries between the restaurants and hospitals on a donation basis.

Now he says other chefs in the city are getting involved to make a regular rotation of providing meals to ER’s.

“Kim Alter of nightbird restaurant shell be feeding same properties so shell be delivering tonight and its going to start continuously going from restaurant to restaurant taking care of these folks in the hospital,” Cosentino said.

All owners and staff pitching in after their restaurants suffered losses and were then forced to close or offer take out only.

“We all need to help. We need to do what we can. Our restaurant is officially closed. We have no food left. All the managers came in yesterday from the kitchen and front of the house as well as my wife to produce and we did what we had to do,” Cosentino said.

Hoping they’ll be able to take care of their own once again when the bans are lifted.

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