SINCE its establishment in 2017, a restaurant in Bao’an District has been providing free breakfast for sanitation workers, the handicapped and senior residents. The restaurant was awarded at this year’s annual Shenzhen Charity Awards on Saturday, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported.

The two owners of the restaurant, Huang Chuangjiu and Huang Jintian, were awarded at the ceremony over the weekend for their charitable behavior.

The hotpot restaurant in Bao’an has offered 100 servings of free breakfast each morning since opening a year ago. After the newspaper reported on the restaurant’s gracious act, many volunteers have joined in to help make and serve breakfast this year.

Every day, starting from 6 a.m., the owners and some volunteers get busy preparing breakfast, including buns, vegetables and pumpkin porridge. By around 6:40 a.m., all of the breakfasts are ready for those who don’t have a place to get breakfast.

According to the owners, they would not be ready until 7 a.m. without the volunteers. Before volunteers started to help, the two brothers needed to get up at 5 a.m. to cook the pumpkin porridge.

“It was around this August that three or four volunteers started to come and offer their help,” said Li Changhui, the manager of the restaurant. Gradually, more came to the restaurant to help in the following months.

“We might not have been able to keep providing free breakfasts if it wasn’t for the volunteers’ help,” Huang Chuangjiu admitted.

Some volunteers are customers who had been provided with free breakfasts in the morning and wished to give back to the restaurant.

Each morning, a lot of frequent customers come to the restaurant to have breakfast. Some of them are elderly people who live alone, while others are sanitation workers who finish their morning shifts early.

Huang Chuangjiu hopes to open more chain stores in other areas to offer free breakfast.

The owners do not think that they have done a big thing by offering free breakfast, even after winning the charity award. “We don’t have a lot of money, so we are just doing what we can for charity,” said the owners.

(Zhang Qian)