Good food always connects us. Rat’s Restaurant is proud to still be doing what they do so well — feeding people.
Rat’s, named for a character in Kenneth Graham’s children’s classic, The Wind in the Willows, is a fine-dining restaurant on the Grounds For Sculpture campus in Hamilton. It was designed to give visitors the sense they have stepped into a village reminiscent of the impressionist painter Claude Monet’s beloved town of Giverny.On a busy day, the kitchen normally prepares more than 500 meals. However, by mid-March, the kitchen was at a standstill due to Covid-19 and Gov. Phil Murphy’s executive order for restaurants to close their dining rooms and for New Jersey residents to stay at home.Many employees were working remotely, or furloughed. But in early April, Rat’s, managed by Constellation Culinary Group, was contacted by
, a national provider of fresh and frozen meals.They needed to expand their capacity to provide meals for the food insecure in New York City. Rat’s rallied quickly and devised a plan to jump into production and start cooking.As of early May, Rat’s reports that it had reinstated a number of jobs and pivoted to fresh-meal production for those in need. At the restaurant, production is at an all-time high, and they report cooking more than 6,500 meals a day.
