The well-orchestrated bustle among the kitchen staff and the well-dressed diners out front were a familiar sight at TRU restaurant on Jan. 27. But this particular dinner service had a more somber undercurrent and a resonance for anyone connected with the restaurant industry.
One hundred and eleven guests were there for a fundraiser, hosted by TRU chefs Rick Tramonto and Gale Gand, to benefit the James Beard Foundation and its scholarship program for families of food-service workers killed during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Featuring eight courses that combined the talents of local culinary stars with chefs from New York and New Jersey, the evening’s most honored visitors were executive chef Michael Lomonaco, sous-chef Michael Ammirati and manager Glenn Vogt of Windows on the World,a restaurant once best known for fine dining and spectacular views from atop the World Trade Center. Seventy-nine employees of the restaurant died that day.
By the end of the night, $18,000 had been raised.
“It is outstanding that another city is so supportive of the people of New York,” said guest chef Gerry Hayden of New York’s Aureole restaurant. “It has been a great outpouring of good will.”
There also was a personal connection between Windows on the World and TRU, more recent than the time during the 1980s when Lomonaco and Tramonto both worked in New York restaurants.
Windows assistant general manager Christine Olender, a Chicago native, dined at TRU last summer and returned to her colleagues in New York clutching a menu and singing the restaurant’s praises. Olender, 39, died during the attacks.
When the staff at TRU recently learned about Olender’s enthusiasm, they decided to plan a dinner that would benefit the Windows’ cause.
“The whole staff volunteered to work for free,” Tramonto said, although they were paid for their time. The emotional pull for Tramonto was apparent, he said, because his staff is “like a family. Without them I am nothing, and it would be devastating to lose them.”
That the three men from Windows on the World escaped the fate of their co-workers was a matter of timing. Vogt had a 9 a.m. meeting at the restaurant and was driving to work when the first plane hit the building. From his car he watched the towers fall.
Ammirati was at the gym when he saw the crash on a television monitor.
“My trainer said, `Mike, isn’t that your building?,'” Ammirati said. The tragedy “rocked everything. I lost friends, I lost my job. My sister-in law’s brother died there.”
Lomonaco, usually at the restaurant by 8:30 a.m., was in the building when the plane hit, but had decided to run a last-minute errand at an eyeglass store downstairs.
The evening was a chance for the men to participate in the production of another grand dinner. The meal, for which tickets cost $200 to $250 per person, was worthy of praise in any city.
The food included Caliterra chef John Coletta’s towers of roasted heirloom beets with goat cheese; Tramonto’s razor clams with blistered corn; Hayden’s citrus-marinated fluke with ruby red grapefruit and ginger cracklings; Les Nomades chef Roland Liccioni’s loup de mer in a fragrant foie gras broth; and roasted duck over a salad of barley, amaranth and quince from chef Craig Shelton of the Ryland Inn in New Jersey.
Lomonaco and Ammirati presented the main course, tender saddle of venison glazed with clover honey and a side dish of truffled celery root puree with black trumpet mushrooms.
Instead of sweets, pastry queen Gand turned her hand to a cheese plate of cow’s and goat’s milk cheeses and slices of panforte. For dessert, New York’s Gramercy Tavern pastry chef Claudia Fleming presented bowls of coconut tapioca topped with scoops of sorbets made of passion fruit and coconut, followed by miniature chocolates and other pastries.
Sommeliers Joseph Spellman of Paterno Wines International and Steven Lande of the Ritz-Carlton volunteered their services alongside TRU’s Scott Tyree. The wines included 1990 Veuve Cliquot La Grande Dame Champagne; 1999 Au Bon Climat Hildegard; 1998 Angelo Gaja Barbaresco; and 1990 Quarts de Chaume from Domaine des Baumard.
The kitchen staff celebrated the end of the service by breaking out bottles of beer.
Lomonaco later reflected on the success of the evening by noting that the key to the restaurant business is “hospitality and generosity. So it’s actually not surprising to see such support, which has only been too generous. It refuels our spirit.
“All restaurant people can understand what it would be like to lose the people they work with intimately,” Lomonaco said.
