Imagine life during April of 2020, the heart of lockdown: restaurants closed, everyone masked up and people standing six feet apart. With customers required to stay home, many Oak Park restaurants were in trouble. Enter Ravi Parakkat, a local engineer and business leader, who came up with an innovative campaign.
To help these restaurants survive, Parakkat founded Takeout 25 to get local residents to spend $25 per week on takeout meals. The goal: to get 10,000 people to participate, which would equal $1 million per month in support for these businesses, according to the organization’s website.
Figuring out how to help was challenging at first, Parakkat recalled. “So the community was divided,” he said. “We had one half of the community saying, ‘Hey we need to look at the community health and prioritize that in the middle of a pandemic,’ and another set of people saying, ‘Hey but what about our local restaurants, and what about their survival? We don’t want to lose them.’”
Parakkat decided to focus on takeout, instead of dining in, because it allowed restaurants to make money without compromising health.
After the pandemic, Takeout 25 continued to help local restaurants. It became a not-for-profit organization, and today there are 13,800 community members in the Takeout 25 Facebook group and 100 restaurants in the Takeout 25 network. Parakkat is now an Oak Park Village Trustee; he was voted into office in 2021.
The organization now also focuses on food insecurity and environmentally sustainable practices for restaurants through its Green Dining Initiative. Zoharia Drizin, the leader of the initiative, said, “The goal is to provide highly technical sustainability reporting so that we can provide them with high impact, low cost recommendations to help them improve their sustainability as a restaurant.”
One business that was impacted by Takeout 25 was the Buzz Cafe in Oak Park (recently acquired by Kribi Coffee). The former owner, Laura Maychruk, said, “It just made local people more aware that local restaurants needed their support to stay in business.”
Maychruk was eager to be part of the Green Dining Initiative, saying, “Well, I’m a green business, or I should say I was, because you know I sold the business. But the cafe was a green certified sustainable restaurant. So I’m all about it.”
Restaurants often don’t have the resources for this kind of support on their own, as many are small businesses. According to the National Restaurant Association, 90% of restaurants in the U.S. have fewer than 50 employees.
Furthermore, local, individually owned restaurants play an important part in keeping neighborhoods interesting and appealing for visitors and residents. Visualize Lake Street in Oak Park filled with only corporate restaurants like Burger King, Shake Shack, Chipotle, Panera and McDonalds. While chain restaurants do have a presence in Oak Park, they are scattered among locally-owned places like Scratch on Lake, Amerikas and Hecho en Oak Park.
Organizations like Takeout 25 aim to ensure that these places stick around even through tough times.
