A New Zealand born chef's New York restaurant is donating funds to emergency services from every meal sold.
Jamie Kenyon was born on Auckland's North Shore before moving to the UK as a young boy and then to New York where he found his passion for the culinary arts.
After quickly establishing himself in the competitive New York food scene and gaining a Michelin star, Mr Kenyon became a partner of Bottino restaurant in April 2019.
This year has seen the 32-year-old chef face his biggest challenge in the industry yet, with the Covid-19 pandemic hitting New York hard.
"These are very difficult and challenging times for many industries, especially small businesses and restaurants," he told 1 NEWS.
"Bottino has survived over 20 years in NYC including 9/11, hurricane Sandy and the financial crisis but these are the most trying times we've seen yet.
"The industry is really suffering as we can't do business at a level that allows us to come close to breaking even and there have been limited guidelines or precedents to rely on to understand how to overcome such a hit to revenue."
Despite this, Mr Kenyon's restaurant is helping emergency services on the frontline of the pandemic.
"We are donating 10% of our sales to EMS. The second day we reopened for takeout/delivery, we discovered that there was an EMS team two blocks away from us when they asked if we would cater lunch for them.
"We are very grateful for all that they are doing during these trying times and consider them true heros of NYC. Therefore, we made the decision that 10% of all sales would be donated to their EMS squad."
He has been keeping in touch with family and friends back in New Zealand and is "very impressed how well they were able to maintain the spread of the virus. I'm extremely happy to see that life is starting to get back to normal this quickly."
With restrictions slowly easing in New York Mr Kenyon is excited to welcome customers back to the restaurant.
"We will finally be able to open at 50% capacity for outdoor dining on Monday, June 22, but given the limited real estate in NYC, outdoor areas are hard to find.
"We feel very lucky to have an outdoor garden that we can open and begin welcoming our neighbours back to enjoy a small sense of normality. Overall the parks are open and people are starting to return to their offices albeit at a very limited number."
The safety of guests and staff will be a top priority for the restaurant.
"In terms of safe practices we sanitize all surfaces and areas every 15 minutes (or more frequently if needed), everyone (staff and guests included) must wear masks at all times except when eating and staff are also required to wear gloves at all times.
"We ensure that all staff are kept six feet apart from one another and guests. Overall, we're following all rules of the CDC extremely closely and want to ensure that anyone at Bottino (including our staff) feels safe at all times."
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