O.C. Customers Are Eating Out With Good Cause--for Charity

Several Orange County restaurants are being charitable this summer when customers order certain dishes, desserts or drinks.

Cafe Tu Tu Tango at the Block at Orange took 50 cents from every one of its daily specials sold over a three-month period and donated the proceeds to Children’s Hospital Foundation of Orange County. A check for $4,426 was presented to CHOC in late July.

Charitable donations are nothing new at Mimi’s Cafe restaurants. For some time, each time a patron orders the chain’s signature French onion soup, the proceeds are placed in Mimi’s Second Chance Fund, which assists several shelters for battered women. Recently, a total of $5,000 was donated to five women.

Earlier this summer, Savannah Chop House in Laguna Niguel began donating money to the Baby Alumni Club, a program at Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Laguna Hills that helps educate prospective parents. The restaurant makes a donation each time a customer orders its Southern Decadence dessert, a chocolate pecan tart drizzled in bourbon caramel sauce.

Over at Left at Albuquerque in Irvine, proceeds from the drink “La Bebida Loca” go to the Orange County Firemen’s Benevolent Fund, which provides economic relief to families of firefighters killed or injured in action. The drink is a concoction similar to a Bloody Mary.

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Greg Hernandez covers the restaurant industry for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-5989 and at greg.hernandez@latimes.com.