This month, customers ordering online from The Eagle, Bakersfield, Pepp & Dolores, Currito and other Thunderdome Restaurant Group eateries will have the opportunity to purchase an additional meal for a member of the community in need. The Cincinnati-based restaurant group has partnered with City Gospel Mission to provide hot meals that will be delivered and served to the hungry in early March.
Online customers will be given the option to add $10 to their order as a donation. At the end of the month, donation proceeds will go toward the supplies, preparation, delivery and service expenses.
“We thought that this would just be a great way to live and breathe one of our core values, which is adding value to the communities around us, and to show gratitude for all the support we’ve received and just send some positive vibes out into the universe,” Joe Lanni, co-founder and co-owner of Thunderdome Restaurant Group, tells CityBeat.
Lanni says the COVID-19 pandemic has placed several issues into perspective, one of which was operating a food service business in a community currently in need.
“The feeling within our organization is that this has really given us a little perspective and ability to kind of reflect on the state of the world and what’s going on in the country,” Lanni says. “There’s the light at the end of the tunnel, and we want to feed that fire and hopefully push forward into a better time in the spring and summer.”
The meal will be prepared by Pepp & Dolores and will include house-made spaghetti pomodoro, a green salad with pink peppercorn vinaigrette and Allez bakery sourdough bread.
“It’s wholesome, it’s comforting. It means a lot to the ownership of our company because it’s a meal that we ate our whole lives growing up and continue to eat with our children,” Lanni says.
This initiative has also provided relief to Thunderdome’s catering department, which has experienced a 90% decrease in business since the pandemic.
“That was a silver lining here. It’s not the reason that we decided to go forward with this, but it just was like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna be able to help people and this also is something that’s going to allow us to keep the catering department focused on catering and feeding people and doing what they do,’” Lanni says.
Since launching earlier this month, Lanni described the reaction to this initiative as “very well received” with a steady rate of donations.
According to Lanni, this is just the beginning of Thunderdome’s initiatives to help the community. The Thunderdome Restaurant Group plans to partner with several more charitable organizations in a similar way throughout the year.
“Our hope is that if things go well, in future we can add additional partners that we can partner with for a month and kind of make an initiative that will be able to touch a lot of charitable organizations in the area,” Lanni says.
Thunderdome online ordering customers can donate from any Cincinnati-area restaurant, such as Bakersfield, The Eagle, Pepp & Dolores, Maplewood’s Deerfield location, Currito and CityBird.
To donate, customers can visit the online ordering portal on each restaurant’s respective website, select the “Donate a Meal,” and proceed to check out. Visit each restaurant’s website for more details.
This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2021.