Customers flocked to the bright red and yellow awning of Mac’s Deli on a cloudy Thursday afternoon, walking away with foil-wrapped workday lunches of warm Italian beef sandwiches and hot dogs.
Inside the new restaurant on Sangamon Street in the West Loop, the grills, fryers and registers were all manned by workers currently in recovery from drug addiction.
Preparing the French fries was Bryant Wynne, a 46-year-old South Side native whose first job was working as a fry person at Wendy’s. He has been a client of the Haymarket Center, a nonprofit treatment center for substance use disorders in the West Loop, for about a year and a half.
“(Haymarket Center) has helped people that may have fallen off track to get back on track,” said Wynne as he took his lunch break on Thursday. “Sometimes we gotta do what I call the reset. Once we do the reset, we get time enough to come to a place like this, get our lives back together again, and then go on. Then we can push play.”
Monday marked the grand opening of Mac’s Deli, a restaurant that Haymarket Center has opened in order to employ patients in recovery and provide them with job training. Mac’s Deli will be fully staffed by Haymarket Center clients, with the proceeds from its classic Chicago fare going toward the center’s initiatives.