[title type="h3"]Help Your Favorite Hurricane Victim: Cook, Waiter, or Restaurant In Texas Or Florida.[/title] Among the many reasons that the New Orleans restaurant community was able to recover so quickly and so thoroughly after Hurricane Katrina was that the restaurants came together to help restaurant employees come back from wherever they evacuated. Part of the program had checks for $3,000 sent to many such people, to persuade them that there was a future for hospitality workers here in New Orleans. The same scene--but much worse than Katrina--occurred with the visits from hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Louisiana restaurateurs owed a big favor to southeast Texas's restaurants and people. Meanwhile, across the nation came a groundswell of charitable giving to affected restaurateurs. All of this reaches a crescendo today as a national Dine-Out day unfolds all day long. The concept is simple. Call a restaurants you're interested in for lunch or dinner today, and ask whether the place is participating in the Dine-Out Day. (Many restaurants have signed on, but if there's a list of all the participants, I haven't been able to find it.) From that point, everything is easy. Go to one of the Dine-Out Day participants. Order whatever looks good, pay the regular prices for everything. Then the restaurant kicks back a percentage of your pre-tax, pre-tip to the coordinators at the Louisiana Restaurant Association. Example: Commander's Palace is giving ten percent of tonight's total take and sending it to the LRA, which sends the money to those who need it the most. Costs you no more than on any other nights, but the affected restaurant folks get a well-needed boost. This help is going on across the country, and includes some of the most famous restaurants in America. At the very least, this is a much nicer thing to think about than that other big headline today.