Volunteers Needed for Food Distribution & Cultural Solidarity

Volunteers are needed on the weekend of August 15-16, 2021, Noon-8pm, for local nonprofit organization Your Stomach Loves Us and restaurant chain Go!Go!Curry! to kick off a campaign to heal hearts and build understanding through food sharing. The event, which will take place at 567 W. 125th St., New York, NY 10027, is made possible through donations via GoFundMe.

Your Stomach Loves Us, a local nonprofit, started this spring to provide a tasty heart-healing alternative to the violence that has erupted toward Asian-Americans since the COVID-19 pandemic began, is teaming with Japanese restaurant chain Go! Go! Curry! to give away 1,000 orders of the company’s signature curry and deep-fried chicken cutlet outside its Harlem location on August 15th and 16th.

YSLU’s core mission is to feed the communities where hostile incidents have occurred free of charge, spreading love and understanding one meal at a time. The Harlem event, which will be held starting at noon on August 15 and 16 at Go! Go! Curry!’s Harlem restaurant at 567 W. 125th St., is the first of several planned throughout cities in the United States, including San Francisco and Los Angeles. Other dishes like Filipino lumpia, Chinese baozi, Korean dukbokki, will help chefs fight anti-Asian racist hate with the great equalizer—food. These events are possible thanks to $14,000 in donations to the YSLU’s GoFundMe including a $5,000 direct donation from GoFundMe.

“I’ve seen too many posts and videos recently of anti-Asian violent incidents,” Greg Taniguchi, the co-founder of Your Stomach Loves Us, who runs a digital branding consultancy, said. “This time, I’m not simply closing my browser. I’m doing something about it. The person you share food with could, one day, need you to watch their back. It’s bigger than color. It’s a practice of love.”

YSLU co-founder Karl Palma turned to Go! Go! Curry! because he thought its ethos was a good fit for the nonprofit’s mission of spreading love through delicious food. “Harlem’s a very soulful place and Kanazawa curry’s known as the quintessential soul food of Japan along with takoyaki,” says Palma founder and Chef of KARLSBALLS, which has been selling the latter at Japanese festivals throughout New York City since 2015. “Most of my Japanese buddies and myself we were all raised on Japanese curry. It makes sense to connect the soul food of Japan with Harlem.”

Each meal will consist of Go!Go!’s Kanazawa-style Japanese curry, a dark, thick curry sauce served over Koshihikari rice, a premium short grain rice, with a side of very thinly shredded cabbage, all topped with a chicken katsu—a crispy, deep-fried cutlet.

“Our mission is to inspire the spirit of Genki—happy, healthy, fine, positive and energetic in Japanese—through delicious authentic Japanese comfort food,” Tomoko Omori, President and CEO of Go!Go! Curry! America said when asked about the initiative. “We are happy to work with YSLU to pay it forward by plating Japanese Katsu curry forward.”

Go! Go! Curry! serves Kanazawa-style curry originating from Kanazawa, in Japan’s Ishikawa prefecture. The curry style is a dark and thick curry sauce served over Koshihikari rice, a premium short grain rice, with a side of very thinly shredded cabbage, all topped with a pork or chicken katsu—a crispy, deep-fried cutlet! We have more than 75 locations in Japan, one in Brazil and seven stores in the United States. “Go” means five in Japanese and, of course, moving forward in English. Our first U.S. store opened near Times Square in 2007. We now have six others in New York City and one in Cambridge, Mass. We would like to continue expanding Go! Go! Curry! in the U.S. and Canada.