The Epicurean Garage, a restaurant in the Eagle Pointe Village Shopping Center in Chester Springs, has been raising money and providing food for charities in the community, a gesture that has gained momentum with their customers and even competitors.

“We have always viewed the restaurant as a community-oriented project, with a bigger mission than just being a restaurant and serving great food,” said Topher Wurts, a marketing consultant and partner in the Epicurean Garage. “And we’ve always done things for local charities and sports teams, but not in an organized way.”

With the onset of COVID-19 and the economic hardships it has created, Wurts and his team were moved to organize some novel ways of giving back to those in need – efforts that have caught on with their customer base and neighboring restaurants.

The genesis of those efforts were simple discussions at a staff meeting at the time of Gov. Tom Wolf’s decision to close restaurants due to the pandemic.

“We decided that night on three mandates for the restaurant,” said Wurts. “To do everything we could to stay open and deliver meals safely to our local community; to take actions to keep the staff working and earning, so they could pay their bills; and to do everything we could to help anyone in need in our local community.”

With deliveries now an option, along with pickups, many on the staff were repurposed as delivery drivers. Then, the restaurant changed its pay approach as a way to keep staff members, many of whom are high school and college students, working and paying their bills. This entailed deciding that the entire staff be paid minimum wage, rather than have many continue to rely on a lesser wage, plus tips. In turn, 100 percent of the tips from food deliveries would be pooled and divided evenly among the crew. This decision was communicated in a post on the restaurant’s Facebook page, and, according to Wurts, customers responded in a big way with bigger tips.

The restaurant’s first charitable action had nothing to do with its own food, however. The team decided to pick up and deliver online grocery orders from the nearby Acme, free of charge and regardless of whether the recipients were customers of the restaurant. But once the word got out, things began picking up for their restaurant.

“I was chatting with a friend of the restaurant who decided to match whatever our tips were for a week as a donation to the Chester County Food Bank,” said Wurts. “The next week, a random family said that for every order we take in, they will donate $10 to the Food Bank. Then, they doubled down to $20 for each order the following Sunday.”

By the time yet another family joined in on that strategy, the restaurant had raised more than $15,000 for the Food Bank.

“We were gobsmacked,” said Wurts. “One of our staff said it was like the Epicurean Garage was giving back, and that’s how our hashtag (#GarageGivesBack) was born.”

Since then, more friends of the restaurant have stepped up to help with charitable giving. These have included raising $5,000 to help out a local micro farm business, having a local faith-based group buy dinners from the Garage as a donation to Safe Harbor of Chester County, and delivering Mother’s Day gift baskets with $100 gift cards to 38 homeless mothers associated with Home of the Sparrow.

“People kept showing up, and all of these giving-back programs in place kept rolling,” said Wurts.

Another example of how his restaurant’s giving back has inspired others came from a decision by several nearby restaurants to join with the Garage to raise $20,000 in gift cards for local first responders. And recently, one of the food suppliers to the Garage, the Clemens Food Group, got into the act.

“They contacted us and said they liked what we were doing for the Food Bank,” said Wurts, “so they decided to send it several pallets of their ham.”

Through it all, the Epicurean Garage has not had to lay off any staffers.

When looking back on how #GarageGivesBack grew from that initial team meeting, Wurts remains grateful, if not a bit surprised, how the community and his customers have responded with each weekly giving theme.

“It’s pretty interesting how this all happened,” he said. “We didn’t have a vision or anything; it just kind of developed. It feels good, and it’s the right thing to do, and I think it’s also making a lasting impact on the high school and college kids on our staff. We think we’re making better humans for the experience.”

Click here to learn more about the Epicurean Garage.

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