If you needed another reason to tuck into a parmigiana, you’re in luck.
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The Imperial Hotel has jumped on board the “Parma for a Farmer” initiative, donating a dollar from every parmigiana, pizza schnitzel, bolognese schnitzel and bar tips to drought relief.
Imperial Hotel owner, Richard Morgan, said in the two weeks the initiative had been running they had managed to raise $392.50.
“We’ve been quite happy with what we’ve raised so far,” he said.
“We had seen other places doing dollar donations and thought why not us?
“So it has been in the works for about a month, we thought we had the means here being a busy restaurant to raise some funds, so we’ve gone for it and were going to keep doing it for as long as it’s needed.
“We are also planning to hit up one of our beer suppliers to hopefully get some kegs at a cheaper price, and do another fundraiser night with all the proceeds to be added into the donation.
“We are just figuring out who the money will go to, at the moment we are looking at giving it to the Coles drought relief fund,” he said.
Mr Morgan said he had seen a slight increase in parmigiana sales since starting the initiative.
“We sell a lot of them anyway, but there has been an increase in the sales. People have seen the initiative and are going towards a parmy,” he said.
“We have standard order of about 100kg of chicken breast and we’ve been running out.
“There have been tables coming in and just ordering parmies, plus any tips we are getting is going into the donation bucket.
“It’s a very typical Australian thing to get behind those doing it tough, so we hope everyone gets behind it. When you are looking at the menu, think about ordering a parmy and feel free to chuck some spare change in the bucket, every little bit helps,” he said.
Mr Morgan said growing up on a beef farm he had seen the affect of drought first hand.
“My father was a second generation beef farmer,” he said.
“Although the farm has been sold for a while now, when I was a kid we went through a pretty extreme drought. As child you don’t really see the affect, but for the farmers things seemed dire.
“So when you have a collaboration like this of everyone just doing a little bit, it makes a massive difference.”