A few weeks ago, I had dinner at LaSorted’s in Chinatown, eating pizza and drinking wine with my husband while our toddler gnawed at a crust and threw a few salad leaves onto the floor. When I walked in this past Wednesday — as thousands of acres of Los Angeles still burned — the dining room was nearly unrecognizable, its wobbly tables reconfigured into a makeshift kitchen.
Pizza makers from all over the city were squashed inside, unpacking supplies and folding boxes. The line out the door looked like diners waiting for tables — blue Dodgers hats, oversize vintage button-downs, esoteric diner T-shirts — but this was a crew of volunteer drivers who’d signed up on Instagram. They were waiting for instructions from other volunteers who sorted hundreds of requests in a series of spreadsheets, text messages and DMs.
Thousands of firefighters are still working to contain the wildfires that displaced tens of thousands of Angelenos. Every day, several times a day, a collaborative, grass-roots patchwork of restaurant kitchens, trucks and makeshift catering operations, just like this one, feed the city’s emergency workers and evacuees.
“It’s not something you train for or something you learn,” said Tommy Brockert, the chef at LaSorted’s, who had evacuated but was now back home. “When things like this happen, people are able to do extraordinary things.”
Neighborhood restaurants aren’t exactly set up to respond to emergencies, but they just can’t help themselves. The best kind of restaurant people tend to have a fundamental sense of hospitality, combined with an ability to deftly organize chaos.
No one has a greater sense of urgency about cooking for people and caring for them, regardless of the logistical nightmares that might be involved. Day to day, that might mean that dinner service is going smoothly. When disaster strikes, it means 200 people spread across five locations will get a hot dinner.
There are so many restaurants and restaurant workers helping out (many of them displaced themselves) that the Los Angeles Times plotted them on a map. In her newsletter, the writer Emily Wilson tracked the various resources they provided, along with their fund-raisers and calls for volunteers and donations.
Khushbu Shah, a New York Times contributor who helped deliver some meals herself, wondered when all of the independent restaurants that stepped in to help might find some financial support.
Most places extending radical hospitality are doing it out of pocket or through an unsteady 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 with over the phone this week said employees were asking for hours they couldn’t give them — their dining rooms were too quiet. They said bills were piling up. They said that a few years ago, they might have been able to weather a few tough days or even one tough week, but not now. Not after the compounding financial losses of the pandemic and the strikes. Soon, they said, the closings would start.
Still I was taken by surprise when the owners of the Ruby Fruit, a lesbian bar in Silver Lake that I reviewed a couple of years ago, announced they were closing — at least temporarily — because of the wildfires. It was becoming clear that even restaurants far away from the flames and toxic smoke weren’t safe from this disaster.
I’d canceled a few reservations in the first few days of the fires, or restaurants had called to cancel with me. Now it isn’t a safety issue as much as a vibe issue: In so many neighborhoods, restaurants are open, air purifiers running, but people still aren’t going out. When the whole city is mourning, there’s no getting away from your own sense of grief.
I didn’t realize how much I needed to get out until I showered, washed my hair and took some of my colleagues to dinner in East Hollywood. These reporters had been in the field all day, all week, or unable to step away from their laptops.
I felt my body relax the second I held a menu in my hand, the second a server came by and asked if he could bring me something to drink, something to eat. “I needed this,” one of us said, every few minutes, as plates crowded the space between us. “I really, really needed this.”
“This” wasn’t one particular dining room or must-order dish, it was being together in a Los Angeles restaurant while the wildfires still burned. It was the sense of safety, resilience and connection that restaurants insisted on sharing, even as their own staffs weathered the crisis.
There was no getting away from the grief I felt — it dined with us, it was inescapable — but there was no getting away from the gratitude, either.