Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the chefs who fed Ground Zero workers around the clock are looking back on the makeshift operation that united New York’s restaurant community.
Chef Don Pintabona spent years cooking for celebrities, Wall Street brokers and other VIPs at the Tribeca Grill in downtown Manhattan. But nothing prepared him and the rest of the city’s restaurant scene for their biggest job.
In the hours after the World Trade Center was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, Pintabona said he and many other chefs, caterers, food service workers and others all wanted to help the city with their skills. They just didn’t know how at first.
Through quick thinking, organizing and the generosity of thousands of New Yorkers, Pintabona and other restaurant members built a massive operation that fed Ground Zero workers around the clock for two months after the attacks.
“Everybody kind of just said, ‘Okay, let’s jump in,'” Pintabona, 66, told ABC News.
He and other volunteers of “Operation Chefs with Spirit” said that even though 25 years have passed, the memories of those weeks are still fresh. So is the sense of awe at how they put the operation together.
A Dictionary Page From the Sky
Pintabona said he had a desire to do something after the attacks. But it was a little piece of paper that came to him by chance that sparked his idea.
On Sept. 11, he watched the destruction of the towers from the roof of his home in Brooklyn. His home was so close that pieces of paper debris from the towers floated in the air near him.
One of those was a “P” page from a dictionary. When Pintabona picked it up, he noticed that one side of the page had words with negative connotations, such as “pesky.” The other side had words such as “persevere,” “perseverance” and “persistence.”
“I mean, in my mind, this came straight from heaven, that through the perversion, you gotta persist, you gotta persevere,” he said. “So those words were banging around my head for the days and weeks and just trying to figure out how can I live up to this.”
The next day, Pintabona got to his restaurant and started cooking with what he had in his kitchen. He brought the food to Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan, one of the staging areas for first responders.
“We had just floods of people coming in to attack the food,” he said, adding that the meals were gone in a matter of hours.
The Barge Idea
Pintabona wanted to feed more people. But transporting meals through the streets was a challenge. The roads were damaged and restricted to first responders and the National Guard.
He said he had a eureka moment during a cigarette break while watching the Hudson River.
“I saw a barge…And I said, ‘Holy s—, this is it. We’ve got to feed everybody by boat,'” he recalled.
Pintabona told ABC News he found that other chefs in the city were also interested in feeding the Ground Zero workers. They all put their heads together.
He started calling contacts in the food industry, the city government and the owner of Spirit Cruises, which operated city sightseeing and party cruise lines. Things quickly fell into place.
Spirit provided three boats. One at Chelsea Piers was used to cook and prepare the meals. Another transported the food to Ground Zero. A third, a triple decker, was stationed in Battery Park City near the pit for workers to eat and rest.
Top Chefs and a Tennis Center’s Leftovers
The city’s top chefs — such as Charlie Palmer, Danny Meyer and Daniel Boulud — and food workers and volunteers were given tasks. Everything from cutting vegetables to organizing forks, spoons and plates.
Jim Stewart, a longtime food service coordinator with experience at the Meadowlands and other big clients, jumped in when Pintabona made the calls for help. Stewart said he too felt compelled to do something after the attacks.
“I think at that point, having something to do was sort of helpful, and it gave you some sort of purpose in a very difficult situation,” Stewart, 66, a Navy veteran, told ABC News.
Stewart used his connections to secure food from the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. The food was still in fridges following the end of that year’s U.S. Open.
Stewart and Pintabona estimated that the food from the tennis center could serve 75,000 meals. It was all eaten within three days.
Restaurants Empty Their Fridges
They weren’t the only New Yorkers willing to share from their fridges. Stewart recalled how a whole slew of Downtown Manhattan restaurant staff, from small Chinatown restaurants to larger, more elite eateries like the ones under B.R. Guest, were calling him up and ready to offer their food.
“So they would be bringing down enormous amounts of food packages to go. All the cooks from down there, they brought meals for like 200 people without question for a month,” Stewart said.
“I would get a call, and they would go, ‘At the airport, there’s two pallets of beef from Texas.’ It was not just New York,” Stewart added.
Pintabona said that thousands of New Yorkers arrived at Chelsea Piers ready to volunteer, even those who never cooked a meal in their life.
Although Pintabona had to turn many would-be volunteers away because of space and logistics issues, he said he worked to tailor their skills to fit the operation.
“When they would come on, I would try to talk to as many as possible. ‘Okay, you work at Smith Barney in the accounting department? You know what? We need you to help us inventory the food that comes in off the trucks,'” he recalled. “A lot of people, obviously servers and whatnot, food service people, I would put them front-facing on the buffets.”
The Operation’s Tasks and Locations
The operation ran on a constant cycle. Meals were prepared at Chelsea Piers, shipped by boat to the site, and served to workers on the triple-decker boat. The food came from restaurants, the tennis center, and donations from across the country.
| Task | Location | Crew |
|---|---|---|
| Cooking and meal prep | Chelsea Piers | Chefs and volunteers |
| Food transport | Hudson River by boat | Spirit Cruises boats |
| Serving and rest area | Battery Park City near the pit | Food service workers |
| Food sourcing | Restaurants, USTA tennis center, national donations | Jim Stewart and contacts |
| Volunteer coordination | Chelsea Piers intake | Don Pintabona |
The volunteers came from every corner of the city. Accountants did inventory. Servers worked the buffets. Cooks from the downtown restaurants brought meals for 200 people at a time.
It was a system built in days that ran for two months. And it worked.
25 Years Later
Pintabona is now 66. Stewart is 66 too. Both said the memories of those weeks remain vivid.
The sense of awe at how the operation came together has not faded.
The story of Operation Chefs with Spirit is one of New York’s restaurant community responding to tragedy with skill and speed. It is a reminder of what the city’s food world can do when it works together.
The attacks destroyed the towers. They did not destroy the city’s ability to feed its own.
“9/11 Tribute in Light: Live from Lower Manhattan,” a one-hour ABC News multiplatform live special, premieres on Friday, Sept. 11, at 8:00 p.m. EDT across ABC, Disney+, Hulu, National Geographic, ABC Owned Television Stations livestreams and ABC News Live.
For Pintabona, the dictionary page that floated from the towers still carries its message. Through the perversion, you persist. You persevere.
He did. They all did.
Source: abc13.com
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.