While dining out in Spokane, you’re likely to be greeted by a smiling face, someone who will gently usher you to your table. While scanning the menu and listing your preferences, you’ll receive a considerate recommendation, perhaps a wine pairing, and notation of any dietary restrictions. You’ll feel cared for and welcome.

Behind the smiles, behind the masks of the people who serve you are complex—and sometimes tumultuous—inner lives. Do you wonder who is serving your server, your hostess, your bartender, your cook, your busser?

Since 2009, the answer has been Big Table, a nonprofit dedicated to addressing the unique and pressing issues within the hospitality industry: living paycheck-to-paycheck, battling depression or addiction. According to Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 16.9 percent of those in the accommodations and food service industry struggled with a substance use disorder.

Big Table is able to help in a variety of ways—providing immediate financial assistance to someone in crisis, as well as ongoing support once their life has stabilized. They also host elaborate dinners for those in the industry, prepared by a top chef from the area, to create a greater sense of community. In this way, people connect and look out for each other. Recipients of Big Table care go through a unique referral model (see big-table.com/refer).

As a former chef, Big Table city director Chris Deitz is uniquely suited to understand the stressors of this community, and how being in this industry can become your identity. 

“I definitely could see it from the chef perspective: This is who I am, there’s nothing else. I’ve poured everything into this, and you take that away,” Chris says.

Since the pandemic, all of these issues have only been exacerbated, and with indoor dining recently shut down for the second time this year, Kevin Finch, Big Table executive director, worries the worst is yet to come. When restrictions to indoor dining were first imposed, the unemployment rate in April was 35.4 percent for the restaurant and bar industry, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

“For most of our people who lived on the edge before, they burned through anything that they could have used as a resource. I think it’s more than a double whammy. For many of them, it could feel like the last straw,” Kevin says.

Kadra Evans, owner of Little Noodle, says the support system established by Big Tables is monumental.

“I myself have used Big Table, and just the amount of support—even Chris calling to check up and see how we were getting ready to handle this, it’s huge,” Kadra says. “Everybody has such a great love for each other.”

For her, one of the most difficult things about this time is that she’s accustomed to going to different restaurants to support her friends in the industry.

“If you work in the industry, you don’t normally eat out corporate, you’re always supporting your friends that are working or owning their own businesses,” Kadra says.

Because of these special circumstances,  as well as the stress of the upcoming holiday season, when depression and suicide regularly spike, Big Table has teamed up with FailSafe for Life—a Spokane nonprofit dedicated to suicide prevention—to create mental health resources specifically for the restaurant community.

“We’ve been partnering with them to get training out to folks in the industry around what to look for,” Kevin says, mentioning that Big Table put a video on their website to train people on key mental health signs to watch for this season. 

In this way, Big Table is building upon the community they’ve created— one based upon everyone looking out for one another to get through this difficult time.

“We just know this is a big issue, and we really want to make sure we do something about it before we’re in a place where we go, ‘I wish I’d done something,” Kevin says in the video.

For more information and ways to help, visit big-table.com.