Is this a big commitment?
Serve your team the way you serve your guests.
Tablesetters
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Giving Kitchen is for Everyone.
What Tablesetters Is
Giving Kitchen Tablesetters is a community of restaurants, bars, and food service businesses committed to taking care of their people — and making sure their teams always know where to turn.
Because the people who spend their lives serving others deserve to be served too. Not just when something breaks. Always.
Where This Started
In December 2012, Atlanta chef Ryan “Hidi” Hidinger was diagnosed with stage-four cancer. He was cooking at Muss & Turner’s, and the owners there — Ryan Turner, Todd Mussman, and Chris Hall — did what hospitality people do. They set a table.
What started as a fundraiser for one family became Team Hidi. Team Hidi became Giving Kitchen.
Hidi’s response to all that generosity was not to let it stop at him. He wanted it to be for everybody. That instruction has carried this organization through thirteen years, forty thousand food service workers, and nearly $18 million in direct assistance.
The first Tablesetters were operators.
Everything Giving Kitchen has done since grew out of a decision three restaurant owners made about one of their own. Tablesetters isn’t asking operators to support a nonprofit. It’s asking them to do again, on purpose and at scale, the thing that started all of this.
Why Join
You stop improvising. When someone comes to you at 11pm with an eviction notice, you have somewhere to send them and someone to call.
You stop carrying it alone. Most operators have loaned their own money, moved a schedule, absorbed it personally. Now you have backup.
Your team knows you mean it. Saying you take care of people is one thing. Showing them where to turn before they need it is another. People notice, and they stay.
You’re in a room with your peers. Roundtables and conversations with operators facing exactly what you’re facing.
You help build what comes next. What Tablesetters tell us shapes what Giving Kitchen builds.
The Tablesetters Commitment
Four things. We give you what you need for all of them.
1. Name a GK Ambassador for every location
One person per location who receives updates from us and passes them along. An owner, a general manager, a director of operations — whoever actually talks to staff.
2. Walk your team through Giving Kitchen twice a year
A pre-shift lineup, an onboarding session, a team meeting — a real moment where you’re in the room and your team hears it from you. Posters and QR codes matter, but they aren’t this. We send the words and a short video, so you’re never explaining our programs from memory.
3. Show up in all five ways each year
Educate, Celebrate, Support, Share, Strengthen. One thing in each, in whatever form fits your business. The ideas listed are just ideas — if it fits the spirit, it counts.
4. Represent us well and take care of your people
Follow our brand guidelines — use our name and logo to point people toward help, don’t alter them, don’t imply we endorse a product or a position. And the part that matters more: treat your team the way we’d want any food service worker treated.
The Five Courses
It’s not à la carte. Five courses. Choose something from each one.
1. Educate Your Team — So your people know we exist before they need us. Add GK to onboarding · Run a pre-shift education moment.
- Put Ask For Help resources where your team actually looks
- Include GK in benefits enrollment
2. Celebrate Your Team — Because the people who fuel our celebrations deserve to hear it out loud.
- Join National Food Service Worker Day
- Spotlight someone on your team
- Share appreciation stories
3. Mark a Milestone — Support the Mission Help us help more food service workers.
- Join Dining With Gratitude
- Host a fundraiser
- Donate an experience
- Put a GK donation QR at the register or on checks
- Invite guests to give during an event you’re already running
4. Share the Story — Your voice can help us reach more people.
- Post about GK
- Give us a quote or a testimonial
- Bring another operator to the table
5. Strengthen the Industry — Tell us what’s really happening, so we build the right things.
- Join a roundtable
- Answer a survey
- Tell us what your team is up against
Substitutions always welcome — make any of these your own or bring us something we haven’t thought of.