Donations help Galway restaurateur deliver 10,000 meals to frontline staff

Right at the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis hitting Galway, on the weekend before St Patrick’s Day, Mr Waffle restaurant had a trickle of calls from regular customers.

They were inquiring about ordering and paying for food to gift to the front-line staff working across the road at University Hospital Galway (UHG).

The volume of calls increased and proprietor Kevin Nugent had a brainwave.

On Saturday, March 14, he set up a GoFundMe page to tap-into the goodwill of customers. The idea was that money raised would cover the cost of providing lunches for staff in the hospital.

When the 35-year-old Renmore Park businessman woke up on the following day, Sunday, donations overnight were on course for €3,000.

“I set a target of 500 lunches over the duration of a week, because at that stage we didn’t know whether we were going to be open or closed,” he recalled.

The public’s generosity was staggering – the final GoFundMe count was €15,700 plus loose change.

“It was mental, and then it just escalated,” he said.

By last Thursday, April 30, Mr Waffle reached a final tally of 10,000 lunches delivered to the front-line, many multiples of the original target.

Mr Nugent and Leroy Marshall his head chef at Mr Waffle volunteered their time to make the lunches.

Some days it was something simple like a wrap, bag of crisps, and bottled water; other days it was frittatas, pasta bake, roast dinner, penne pasta, Cajun chicken and salsa mix.

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