SOUTH LOS ANGELES — When the L.A. Yellow Cab pulled up to Mariscos Marias restaurant in South L.A. Tuesday morning, it wasn’t carrying any passengers, and it wasn’t picking anyone up. It was there to help deliver food. 

Grilled salmon. Barbecue chicken. Mixed vegetables. They were all cooked fresh that morning and packed in big brown boxes to be delivered, not as one-offs through Grubhub or Doordash, but as part of a massive, city-run COVID relief program helping restaurants, taxi cab drivers, and low-income seniors.

What You Need To Know

  • More than 500,000 free meals have been delivered to low-income seniors through a city-run COVID relief program

  • Bell Cab, L.A. Yellow Cab, United Checker, and City Cab have delivered almost 105,000 meals

  • 20,000 of the city's 83,000 low-income seniors are receiving meals through the program

  • 28 restaurants are working with the city to prepare the meals

“With the mayor’s safer-at-home order, we were pushing for vulnerable populations not to go out, especially seniors over the age of 60,” said Sumi Parekh, an executive officer with Mayor Garcetti’s office who is overseeing the program. At the same time, her office was hearing that nonprofits were overwhelmed with requests for at-home meal and grocery deliveries. “So we decided to step in and create our own big senior meal delivery program.”

Available to L.A. residents age 60 and up, it launched in May, and has so far delivered more than 500,000 meals. All of those meals are prepared by 28 mostly mom-and-pop restaurants sprinkled throughout the city. Bell Cab, L.A. Yellow Cab, United Checker, and City Cab have made almost 105,000 of those deliveries – five meals at a time, Tuesdays and Saturdays.

“Green squash and chicken breast. Sounds good,” said Kenneth Calvin, as he sliced open the tape on his meal delivery box and read the list of what was inside. “Barbecue chicken. Now I like that. With the brown rice, that’s good. And now they start putting in fruit,” he said, his eyes lighting up at the bag of apples, bananas, and oranges.

Calvin has been getting the free COVID relief meals for about two months, after being furloughed from his job providing transportation services to a mental health center. The 68-year-old lives alone in South L.A. He also has diabetes that puts him at higher risk for COVID, so going out for food is problematic.

Calvin is one of 800,000 senior citizens in L.A., about 83,000 of whom are low-income. Of those, the COVID meal program is serving about 20,000.

Many of the meals are being provided through the Mayor’s Fund for L.A., a nonprofit that operates with public monies and donations from philanthropic groups, as well as a state-federal partnership called Great Plates Delivered.

The program was designed as a triple win for some of the communities that have been hit hardest by the pandemic and the city’s subsequent stay-at-home orders: Seniors, who are most at risk of dying from COVID; restaurants that have seen revenues plummet because they can no longer serve customers inside their facilities; and cab companies that had already hemorrhaged 75 percent of their business in recent years because of competition from Uber and other ride hail providers.

The city is working with taxi companies, in part, because they have the proper background checks to serve the city’s seniors, Parekh said.

Oscar Venegas Torres has been driving a wheelchair accessible van with L.A. Yellow Cab for almost four years. Many of his customers are seniors who still need rides to the grocery store and to run other errands, he said. But these days, most of the driving he does is for the city’s senior meal delivery program.

On Tuesday, all the seats and the entire floor of his van were piled with meal boxes, each of them individually labeled with the recipient’s address and phone number. 

Torres said he isn’t making as much as he used to “when everything was well and running,” but he likes delivering meals because it’s keeping him employed, and “it feels like you’re doing something good.” 

Giovanny Maldonado said the program has helped him retain the 21 workers at his South L.A. restaurant and even hire new staff.

The brick-and-mortar extension of a lunch truck his mother started 30 years ago, the Mariscos Marias seafood restaurant in South L.A. was so popular during pre-pandemic times, it would often have a line out the door. But COVID took away 90 percent of its business. So when City Council member Marqueece Harris-Dawson asked the restaurant to participate in the COVID senior meal program, he was “extremely grateful,” he said. “It’s an amazing feeling to know my family is going to survive this with programs like these.”