Carlton Johnson: Feeding the Hungry
By Charles McGuigan 04.2020
There’s an odd part of human nature that I’ve never really gotten. The haves tend to be pretty selfish; while the have nots sometimes literally give you the shirt off their back. When I was in college, and for a number of years after, I worked jobs that depended primarily on people’s generosity in the form of tips. Gratuities. I drove a cab, worked as a bellhop. But mainly I was a server in restaurants. And here’s what all of us, meaning waiters and waitresses, noticed. The worst tippers were often the wealthiest. If you had a table of suits—stock brokers, CEOs, high-powered attorneys—you could expect a ten percent tip, sometimes even less. And more than a few of them were demanding and demeaning, and felt entitled to do a little ass-grabbing of the waitresses, particularly if it was at night and they’d had a few drinks. On the other hand, if you got a table of waiters and waitresses or minimum wage workers, you could always expect twenty, twenty-five, even thirty percent tips. Plus, they were kind to you, said thank you and please. Common courtesies. So we would all vie for the commoners, not the well-to-do.
There’s a man in a small city thirty miles south of Richmond who really doesn’t have a pot to piss in these days. The pandemic pretty much wiped out his business. But despite that, he’s already giving back to his community in a very big way.
His name is Carlton Johnson. “I am owner and sole proprietor of Exquisite Taste Catering and Events in Petersburg, Virginia,” he tells me. “We had a total of thirty-three events scheduled from the beginning of March through the end of September. Every one of those events has been either postponed or cancelled.”
As the owner of a small business Carl has learned to think fast on his feet. And so he reconfigured his business model, if only temporarily.
“We were in a really bad bind,” Carl says. “So what I did was to take to selling lunches and dinners daily to try to keep the doors of the business open until all of this passes over, and we’re able to start booking and securing events again.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced Carlton to become a one-man band.
“Because we are not bringing in a steady income,” he explains. “I’ve had to lay off all of my staff (six workers in all). So currently, I am doing one hundred percent of the operation myself. I am passing out flyers advertising what we have for lunch and dinner, and then I’m taking the orders, processing transactions. I’m also cooking all the food and delivering all the food by myself.”
Even though he’s barely eeking out a living himself, Carlton did something exceptional immediately after his business went south. It started when he began getting requests, pleas really, from families in the community that were more or less homeless, living in seedy motels. This is how one of those requests, generally in the form of a text message, would read, “If you’ve got something extra, cause I know you’re in the catering business, can you please feed me and my kids.” Then they would tell Carlton their individual stories.
“I have seven families that I feed consistently,” says Carlton. “I take them lunch and I take them dinner every day, twenty-five people. And I’ve been asking people, when I put out the flyers for what we’re selling for a given day, ‘If you’re out of town or you’re not in need of a meal we could really use help with feeding these people.’ I’ve had some people purchase a meal and tell me to give it to one of the twenty-five. Out of twenty-five people, I would say I get five or six donations daily. So the company is feeding nineteen to twenty people a day out of the company’s pocket.”
Carlton performs these corporeal works of mercy for a number of reasons.
“Because I love people,” he says. “I have big heart for people in general.”
But there’s another reason, one that compels Carlton to walk in another man’s shoes. He knows firsthand what it’s like to be without.
“It’s all part of my backstory,” he says. “I was homeless at one point. I lived in a motel at one point.”
He pauses for long time. “Just to not worry about how I was going to feed myself, it took a lot of pressure off of me,” Carlton says. “So if I can give a parent or a child a peace of mind where they can take that energy that they’re putting into trying to figure out how they’re going to eat or possibly going to jail for going to a store stealing something to eat, I’d rather just provide it for them. I don’t care that it puts me and my company in the red.”
Then he says something else. “At the end of the day, I believe that God is going to see my good works, and he’ll take care of me.”
Carlton, when he was still a very young man, not much more than a boy really, found himself homeless.
“I come from a very, very religions family to a point where they have their own church, and my lifestyle was not accepted by my family,” he says. “So because I chose to live in my truth of being gay, my family, they didn’t disown me, but they would not help me as they would help other family members. They all love me and there’s no doubt in my mind about that, however, they do not love the lifestyle that I choose to live. My grandfather put me out of the house so I had nowhere to live. I was on my own.”
Carlton remember those days vividly.
“I got a job at IHOP at the time, and I would literally go to work from open to close just to make enough tips to pay for my motel room just for that day,” he recalls. “You know I would go to the motel, pay for the room, get me a few hours of sleep, get up and go to work. I would go to work every day, and everything I owned was in a backpack and I took that backpack with me every day to work, and that went on for about two years.”
He eventually landed a job that helped him secure a permanent residence.
“I was blessed with an amazing job as a server at a really, really good restaurant—the Italian Kitchen in Mechanicsville,” Carlton says. “I worked my way up from a server all the way up to the dining room manager and the special events manager.”
He later moved to the catering division as a server, and ultimately became the lead sales associate within that catering division. “I stayed with that company until they closed in 2016,” says Carlton. “And that’s when I started Exquisite Taste Catering.”
Regardless what happens, Carlton plans to continue feeding the hungry.
“Like I said, we’re in the red right now because of feeding these people, but I don’t care if I go broke,” he says. “Well, I’ve already gone broke, but I don’t care, I’m gonna feed them every day. I don’t care. I’ll figure out something, some kind of way to do it, but I’m going to feed them every day.”
If you’d like to contact Carlton and make a donation, please call (804)-484-0000, or email him at
carlton@exquisitetastecateringandevents.com
A lot people are depending on it.
