John Brant-Lee is the owner of Bar Avalon Italian Restaurant in West Chester. Over the past couple of months, he has been making lunches and dinners for nurses and dropping them off at the hospital.
He wanted to include and uplift the community in giving back, so he organized pay-as-you-wish dinners, raising $17,000 for the Chester County Food Bank.
"And I just never expect it to take off the way that it did," said Brant-Lee. "It was incredibly busy, we had a line of cars, we had people waiting two hours to get their meal. We had a line of cars that was six, seven blocks long. We shutdown West Chester with complete gridlock. The police came and helped to give out meals to try and move it along."
Two weeks later, $15,000 was raised with pay-as-you-wish dinners for a domestic violence center.
"This one went a little smoother," he said.
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Brant-Lee is not done yet. He's working on an effort to raise money for a soup kitchen.
Currently, for every family-style dinner sold, Bar Avalon will donate a dinner to a Chester County first responder and their family.
"We want them to be able to relax and enjoy a meal with their family and have some sense of normalcy on the 24 hours that they have off," Brant-Lee said.