Charitable Restaurant Model Lets You Lend a Hand by Dining Out

Illustration: Claire Merchlinsky

Anyone who dines out regularly knows the dread-inducing spiel—usually about small plates and sharing—that follows a server asking: “Have you dined with us before?”

But at Emma’s Torch, a cozy restaurant in Brooklyn, N.Y., the question is a prelude to a very different kind of advisory. “We’re a nonprofit restaurant,” began my server on a recent evening, “that provides culinary training and job placement services to refugees, asylees, and survivors of human trafficking. Every dish is created by our students.”

This type of story is being told in many ways at a number of philanthropically minded restaurants, bars, bakeries, ...