Last night, to kick off 20th Essence Festival 2014 in New Orleans, McDonald’s hosted an event at Café Reconcile. Café Reconcile trains the youth and has had more than 2,000 graduates coming through the program and another 200 this year alone. They are a “training program with a restaurant,” who partnered with McDonald’s to inspire the youth to help build the community.
CEO Glen Armantrout for Café Reconcile, “We are here tonight bringing together two community organizations that share the same mission of building up the youth in the community through employment in the hospitality industry. What we do is take the youth of the street, bring them into our four phase program really teaching a lot of life skills but using the Café to serve as the training ground. To date we have had about 2,000 youth come through our program and we have a very high success rate for graduations at 75% and 95% success rate in placement.”
The dinner was made by Chef Jessica and was made from all McDonald’s food. The appetizers above are Chicken and Waffles Canapés, miniture Mc Griddle cakes topped with Spicy Mc Chicken, spiked strawberry jam, maple butter and micro greens.
A dish from the main course was the above Yaka Mein, New Orleans Style Pho featuring grilled steak, potato noodles, beef broth, slivered onions and a soft broiled egg. Check out more photos in the gallery. –joi pearson @joiapearson
Photos by Joi Pearson Photography
