Life Changing Food

A Restaurant Takes On the Opioid Crisis, One Worker at a Time

A Kentucky couple realized that restaurants have an unusual power to help addicted people recover, and created DV8 Kitchen to hire, train and encourage them.
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DV8 Kitchen in Lexington, Ky. The restaurant opened last September, and hires people with opioid addictions. It focuses its entire business model on helping them recover.

By Priya Krishna

July 10, 2018

LEXINGTON, Ky. — Five years ago, Rob and Diane Perez found a spoon and a ramekin in the trash at a branch of their Saul Good Restaurant & Pub, and realized that their top server was doing heroin in the bathroom.

They had already lost the first manager to join their staff; she died in jail after trying to obtain prescription pills illegally. But they didn’t put the pieces together until last year, when they got a call that a cook would not be coming into work because he had overdosed on opioids and died.

They realized that they had lost 13 employees to addiction over 10 years, and that half the cases were related to opioid drugs. “They were not fired,” Mr. Perez said. “They were dead.”