A few weeks ago I had dinner at LaSorted's in Chinatown, where I ate pizza and drank wine with my husband while our toddler gnawed on a crust and tossed a few lettuce leaves on the floor. When I walked in last Wednesday — with thousands of acres of Los Angeles still burning — the dining room was almost unrecognizable, its wobbly tables converted into a makeshift kitchen.
Pizza makers from across the city were squashed inside, unpacking supplies and folding boxes. The line out the door looked like diners waiting for a table — blue Dodgers hats, oversized vintage button-downs, esoteric diner T-shirts — but this was a crew of volunteer drivers signed up on Instagram. They waited for instructions from other volunteers who sorted hundreds of requests into a series of spreadsheets, text messages and DMs.
Thousands of firefighters are still working to contain the wildfires that have displaced tens of thousands of Angelenos. Every day, several times a day, a collaborative, grassroots patchwork of restaurant kitchens, trucks, and makeshift catering companies just like this one feed the city's first responders and evacuees.
“It's not something you train for or something you learn,” said Tommy Brockert, the chef at LaSorted's, who had been evacuated but was now back home. “When things like this happen, people are able to do extraordinary things.”
Neighborhood restaurants aren't exactly equipped to respond to emergencies, but there's just nothing they can do about it. The best kind of restaurant people tend to have a fundamental sense of hospitality, combined with the ability to deftly orchestrate chaos.
No one has a greater sense of urgency when it comes to cooking for people and caring for them, regardless of the logistical nightmares that come with it. From day to day, this can mean that dinner service runs smoothly. If disaster strikes, this means that 200 people spread over five locations will receive a hot dinner.
There are so many restaurants and restaurant workers helping (many of them displaced themselves) that the Los Angeles Times plotted them on a map. In her newsletter, writer Emily Wilson kept track of the various resources they made available, along with their fundraisers and calls for volunteers and donations.
Khushbu Shah, a New York Times contributor who helped deliver some meals himself, wondered when all the independent restaurants that stepped in to help would find financial support.
Most places that offer radical hospitality do so out of pocket or through an unstable stream of donations, and the truth is: no one can afford it. Meanwhile, city officials have said it will be another week before many people can return home.
Chefs I spoke to on the phone this week said employees were asking for hours they couldn't give — their dining rooms were too quiet. They said the bills were piling up. They said that a few years ago they might have been able to get through a few tough days or even a tough week, but not anymore. Not after the increasing financial losses due to the pandemic and the strikes. Soon, they said, the closures would begin.
Still, I was surprised when the owners of Ruby Fruit, a lesbian bar in Silver Lake that I reviewed a few years ago, announced that they were closing – at least temporarily – because of the wildfires. It became clear that even restaurants far away from the flames and toxic smoke were not safe from this disaster.
I had canceled a few reservations in the first few days of the fires, or restaurants had called to cancel with me. Now it's not so much a safety issue as a matter of atmosphere: in so many neighborhoods, restaurants are open and the air purifiers are on, but people are still not going out. When the entire city is mourning, you cannot escape your own feeling of sadness.
I didn't realize how much I needed to get out until I showered, washed my hair, and took some of my coworkers out to dinner in East Hollywood. These reporters had been in the field all day, all week, or couldn't get away from their laptops.
I felt my body relax the moment I held a menu in my hand, the moment a waiter came by and asked if he could bring me something to drink, something to eat. “I needed this,” one of us would say every few minutes, as the space between us filled with plates. “I really, really needed this.”
“This” wasn't a particular dining room or a dish you had to order, it was being together in a restaurant in Los Angeles while the wildfires were still burning. It was the sense of safety, resilience and connection that restaurants were eager to share, even as their own staff weathered the crisis.
There was no escaping the sadness I felt – it was dining with us, it was inescapable – but there was also no escaping the gratitude.
