The day before Thanksgiving, two brothers stir a vat filled with creamy homemade stuffing. They’re in the baseball stadium-sized kitchen at Guaranteed Rate Field making food that will turn into 4,000 holiday meals.
Andy and Joey Lansing’s stirring is comparable to steering — they’re using mixing tools similar to oars to make 800 pounds of stuffing.
Nearby, more than 30 volunteers cut slabs of turkey and make homemade potato chips and sweet potatoes to prep for the early morning start Thursday.
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Meals will be delivered by semi-truck Thanksgiving morning to the Salvation Army Freedom Center for takeaway, dine-in and mobile outreach, plus local women’s shelters, Ronald McDonald House Chicago, Lurie Children’s Hospital, migrant and homeless shelters, and locations where the unhoused typically gather.
“It’s the greatest thing we do,” said Andy Lansing, CEO of Levy Restaurants. “Seven hundred people are having a home-cooked meal in our restaurants tomorrow. We’ll be bringing this exact same food to 4,000 more people.”
This is the nationwide restaurant and hospitality company’s 27th year of giveaways, and its third day of prep. Historically, most of the meals have gone to the Salvation Army. But this year, meals have also been allocated to serve some of the city’s 25,000 asylum-seekers, many of whom have been camped out at police stations.
The Levy team adapted plans to include shelters where migrants are staying in the food sharing on Thanksgiving Day.
Plans to bring meals to migrants made this year’s event the largest ever for Levy Restaurants, which serves locations like Guaranteed Rate Field, the United Center and both Disney World and Disneyland. It even makes dine-in meals at Water Tower Place’s American Girl Cafe.
The tradition is a “tightly choreographed dance,” said Alison Weber, chief creative officer. Weber, like many volunteers, has been involved since the 1997 inception. She’s been on cranberry duty ever since.
The company’s “best day of the year,” Weber says, will begin at 4 a.m., when meals are warmed and loaded.
If the event is a choreographed dance, chef Robin Rosenberg is the instructor. He handles extensive prep and delivery details, easily rattling off the number of meals served at each location. He says 1,200 will go to migrants.
“They removed the migrants out of police stations and into shelters, so we’re finding out where those are and we’re going there, too,” he said.
“It’s literally like having an army,” Weber added. “And Robin is our leader. It helps everybody be involved and feel good about simply being involved, but then you’re doing the good work on the back end. So it’s really kind of cool.”
Meals will be at Salvation Army Freedom Center at 825 N. Christina Ave. on Thanksgiving from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. A mobile team will deliver meals in communities throughout the day.
