Since Anh Vongbandith opened Tipsy Cafe & Catering on Germantown Avenue in 2020, her shop has given out Thanksgiving meals each year to passersby and those in need in the Germantown area. 

“This is our fifth year, it’s just hot turkey dinners, and we just pass it out to the community,” Vongbandith told the Local. “Our first year, we did 200 and I think the most we've ever done is almost 500 meals when people donate a lot of stuff to us.”

And that hasn’t changed, now that they’ve also opened Das Good Cafe, a contemporary Asian, Hawaiian-American fusion restaurant, along with her husband and head chef, Anou. While Tipsy Café & Catering focuses on offering catering and school lunches, they’re serving tabletop meals down at the Wissahickon Avenue end of Chelten Avenue.  

All that experience means that producing a high volume of meals is no challenge for Vongbandith and her team. This year, they prepared more than 400 Thanksgiving meals to give out on Nov. 27 – with turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing and gravy. 

“I do have my team volunteers, whoever's not working and is available, and some of our family and friends, they come and volunteer, but just myself and two of my employees, we prep everything,” Vongbandith said “I mean, we do it every year. So I do a lot of things on volume, so it's just easy for me. We do school lunches here, and we do a lot of bulk catering, and I do wholesale catering on top of that. So doing 1000 meals isn’t even that hard, it's just a lot of planning.”

This year, like every other, they started at 11 a.m. – passing out meals until all the food was gone. They’ve kept the event at Tipsy Café, their original location at 5227 Germantown Ave. because Das Good Cafe serves brunch during those hours. 

“Everybody who's come here for the last four years already knows that now, they line up before 11 o'clock and it's just go, and then we keep giving out until we run out,” Vongbandith said. “If we do have a few leftover – one year we had probably about 20 meals left that nobody came to pick up – we just put it in the Germantown refrigerator.”

Outside her shop, volunteers set up a table with a sign reading “Happy Thanksgiving, Free Turkey Dinner. Come in and get yours!!!” 

People swung by throughout the day, either one at a time or in crowds, collecting their free meals and extras for their families. At times lines formed, but mostly it was people passing by on Germantown Avenue who noticed the sign and decided to get a meal. 

“It's all in one little meal, everybody can grab as many as they want. I mean, we ask people, don't go overboard, but we have no limit,” Vongbandith said.

This year Vongbandith did not receive very many donations for the giveaway, but despite that, she was able to churn out more than 400 meals. 

“We guarantee at least 300 meals all the time and probably this year we will have a little bit more. It all comes out of my pocket,” but that's okay,” said Vongbandith. 

In total Vongbandith and her volunteers gave out 412 meals this year.