Mercy Chefs' ministry brings food to those in need

PORTSMOUTH

It's usually floods, hurricanes or other disasters that get the wheels of Mercy Chefs rolling.

But this year, R. Gary Le-Blanc heads to New York for Thanksgiving, where he will join three other chefs and a dozen helpers to serve 4,000 meals to the poor and homeless.

LeBlanc started the nonprofit ministry two years ago to bring professional food service skills to volunteer disaster relief efforts.

To date, Mercy Chefs has served more than 70,000 meals, half of them during five missions this year, LeBlanc said.

Recent deployments meant meals for tornado victims in Suffolk and Arkansas, flood victims in Ohio and hurricane victims and first responders in Louisiana and Texas.

It was the hurricane that ravaged LeBlanc's former home state that set him in motion.

LeBlanc spent the first half of his hotel and restaurant career in the Big Easy. His parents grew up in New Orleans, which remains home to some family members.

LeBlanc's daughter lost her home to Katrina's flooding in 2005. His grandmother died three months after she was evacuated from hers. She had broken her hip while staying with family in another part of the state.

Soon after the storm hit, Le-Blanc knew he needed to be there to help.

"It was just one of those moments where I couldn't just watch it on TV," he said.

LeBlanc got there through Operation Blessing, a relief agency founded by Pat Robertson.

LeBlanc's wife, Ann, is Robertson's daughter and an associate vice president of the televangelist's Christian Broadcasting Network.

While LeBlanc had worked in the hotel industry long enough to know his way around the kitchen, he had never fed disaster victims or used a mobile kitchen.

Operation Blessing had just purchased a trailer but had yet to equip it with kitchen supplies.

They didn't have a chef or a health permit or a crew for it, he said.

"Not even a can opener."

LeBlanc, a general manager and managing partner of two Hilton hotels in Chesapeake, wasted no time.

"I got their kitchen all set up and working and did my 14 days of disaster relief," he said. "I got home and thought that was it. I had done my thing."

For the next nine months, he found himself waking up at night with ideas of how to improve the mobile kitchen effort.

Some of the feeding efforts in the aftermath of Katrina were scary, he said.

"I saw a lot of food being prepared the best anybody could," he said. "But there wasn't that professional acumen, and I kept thinking, 'You know, I have so many chef friends that could bring some sanitation experience to bear or could bring some creativity.' "

Two weeks after his 50th birthday, he answered what he described as an audible call to "just go feed people."

He launched Mercy Chefs the opening day of the following hurricane season, he said.

The first year he didn't have a mobile kitchen. He linked up with other organizations that did or worked under tents or in churches in the areas that had been affected by disaster.

In August 2007, the ministry dedicated its first custom-built mobile kitchen. It has a diesel generator, and Mercy Chefs travels with water purification units, he said.

"We can purify four to five thousand gallons a day out of a green lake or a ditch," he said.

"If we have water, groceries and volunteers, you could drop us on the moon and we could do 4,000 to 5,000 meals a day."

Today, the nonprofit organization has two mobile kitchens and Mercy Chefs in Florida, Georgia, Texas, Virginia, Maryland, Oklahoma and Wisconsin, he said.

Dave Van Abel, who also is involved in a feeding ministry in Wisconsin, met LeBlanc while they were both working in God's Katrina Kitchen in Mississippi.

LeBlanc told him about his vision for Mercy Chefs.

"I said, 'How do you join something like this?' " Van Abel said. "He said you just did."

Together, the Mercy Chefs have trained more than 100 food service volunteers.

LeBlanc said the ministry is nondenominational and that he works to link up with local community churches.

"We really have looked at the Green Beret model a little bit where 12 Green Berets with the right equipment and 500 locals becomes a very formidable army," LeBlanc said.

In New York, they plan to do seven outreaches, all through either a mission or a church.

They have already been invited to do the same thing next Thanksgiving, he said.

"So I think this is our Thanksgiving tradition," he said.

"Something incredible happens over a shared meal."

Janie Bryant, (757) 446-2453, janie.bryant@pilotonline.com