Mickey Fine Grill Donates 90 Meals To Emergency Workers

BEVERLY HILLS, CA —These days, emergency room staff at Cedar-Sinai are working grueling hours, and many are subsisting on boxes of donated pizza. So when staff from Mickey Fine Pharmacy and Grill arrived with 70 boxes of chicken, rice, and salad, the emergency workers were grateful to have a full, balanced meal.

“I look at it how I would want it – sometimes you want more of a meal,” said Jeff Gross, who owns the iconic chain of diners/pharmacies with his wife Gina Raphael, who said that they knew from the beginning they wanted to find some way to help local front-line responders. “We gave them what was different than the norm, because we the ability to do a wide range of menus.”

Indeed, a full-service diner like Mickey Fine is equipped to make just about anything. For the past three weeks, Gross and Raphael have donated a total of 90 individual full meals in microwaveable containers to Cedars-Sinai emergency workers and Beverly Hills police officers and firefighters. They are also stocking up the workplace’s snack areas with an assortment of snack foods.

Such large-scale donations require a lot of time and money, and Mickey Fine has struggled through the pandemic like many other small businesses. The famous diner closed for a while after the pandemic, and only did small-scale catering. They re-opened last week for breakfast and lunch and business is picking up, but it’s still not what it was pre-pandemic. At the same time, their pharmacy is limited to curbside pickup or delivery only, and won’t experience the usual windfall from Easter and Mother’s Day greeting cards.

“Shop local – not just the restaurants, the market, the pharmacies,” said Gross. “This is really hurting the pharmacies, at a time when people need them more than ever.”