Five-star chef cooks for the homeless

When Chef David Garcelon became Director of Culinary at the iconic Waldorf Astoria Hotel, he knew he would be spending his days planning menus for the likes of President Obama and Hillary Clinton, Angelina Jolie and Michael J. Fox.  

But shortly after he took the reigns in 2011, he received a call from Reverend Edward Sunderland. The Reverend was wondering if Garcelon would be interested in serving a different crowd: the homeless.

Sunderland runs the Crossroads Soup Kitchen at St. Bartholomew’s Church. The church and the hotel have stood side by side along Park Avenue and 50th Street in Manhattan for nearly a century, each occupying a full city block.

Several Waldorf employees were already volunteering as servers, but Sunderland was looking for help behind the scenes.

“He asked me how to get more volunteers,” Garcelon tells CBSNews.com. “It’s not that easy because it’s a 5 a.m. start. But he made a compelling case, so I said I would myself do it.”

One morning each month, Garcelon rises before dawn, picks up a large black coffee, and joins a crew of four or five fellow volunteers. Over the course of two hours, they prepare a hot meal, from scratch, for 150-200 homeless guests.

Crossroads has a full-time chef, John Neely, who has transformed the meals from canned goods to healthy dishes overflowing with fresh ingredients. The soup kitchen served 84,143 meals last year, on a weekly budget of about $750. It boils down to less than $1 per meal. 

“The food here at Crossroads is 1,000 percent improved compared to how it used to be,” says guest Eddie Sanchez. “People used to come here because they wanted to get something to eat because they were hungry. Now they come here because they want to eat what’s being served here.”

“It’s hard to get a meal, but then to get a healthy meal,” added Craig James, “it’s something that’s needed." James, 44, works part-time in the city. “Every little bit of money I had, I had to conserve it. It was adding up,” he says.

Now, he pitches in at Crossroads to help others get a taste of five-star cuisine. When Garcelon joins Neely in the kitchen, the meals are more elaborate. 

“He [Neely] plans the menu around what they have donated. I don’t know what the plan is until I get there,” says Garcelon. “On that day he’ll do something a little more challenging, something that requires more skills.”

On November 18, Neely planned a variation on shepherd’s pie. Having Garcelon on hand to make the mashed potatoes, gravy, sauce, and roasted carrots freed up Neely to work on a salad with roasted butternut squash and a strawberry sauce for the dessert.

The rush to create a meal from scratch, for 200, in just two hours, brings Garcelon back to his early days as a line cook. It’s something he doesn’t experience often anymore, now that he is an executive overseeing more than 140 chefs.

“When you’re a trained chef you know how to assess the situation and it’s fun, I like it,” adds the chef. “It comes right down to the wire sometimes to get it done on time.”

And if he doesn’t get it done right, the Crossroads guests will let him know.

“The feedback from the guests there, it’s not different from the guests here [at the Waldorf],” he says. “You get comments when you’ve done something well, and you get comments when you haven’t.”  

So far, they are giving Neely and Garcelon five stars.

“The food is really very good, it’s always nice and fresh and to my surprise it’s high quality,” said one guest. “If they could rate it in Zagat it would be the number one soup kitchen in the city.”

Since that first morning in the kitchen some two years ago, Garcelon has forged a partnership between the Park Avenue neighbors. Many nights, the hotel sends over bread and pastries. They provide fresh herbs from the rooftop garden. And on Tuesday nights, the hotel also provides dinner to the Crossroads women’s shelter, where 12 women sleep each night.

“Our cooks are very proud of that,” says Garcelon. “It’s not just, let’s throw some leftovers in a tinfoil pan for homeless people. They’re putting as much are into as all the meals we serve here.”

And he is encouraging other neighbors to join in.

“I hope we can get to a point where seven nights a week, some of their neighbors, the hotels and restaurants, are providing a meal for 12 people. It’s not much.”

“We’re neighbors, we’re all in this together,” adds Neely. “We’ve got the facility but they have all kinds of expertise that we really can use. For some people, this is the only meal they eat all day, so it has to be kind of special and the Waldorf has helped us do that.”

When Superstorm Sandy pummeled New York City in October 2012, Rev. Sunderland called Garcelon. All events had been cancelled at the hotel, and Garcelon had the food sent over to the shelter. They kept sending it for nearly a week.

The meal will feature all the fixings of the hotel’s holiday menu, from turkey and mashed potatoes to beef Wellington and leg of lamb. And, of course, apple pie.

It’s a bit of neighborly goodwill that guests, like Sanchez, appreciate.

“You walk down the street and 9 out of 10 people say, ‘something got to be done about these people,’ and they won’t lift a finger," he says. “So when you have places like the Waldorf that donate food … it just helps keep your faith in humanity.”

“Any good cook takes pride in what they’re cooking,” Garcelon says. “No matter who it’s for, whether it’s our employee kitchen, or the homeless or the president.”