Save Me the Plums - Ruth Reichl Page 0,49

when I reached it, was open.

On the other side the air grew clearer, the day stranger. The weather was radiant, and as I drove farther north through green countryside, watching cows placidly munch grass beneath a clear blue sky, it was hard to believe what lay behind me. An hour later, as I pulled into our driveway, I found Michael tossing a ball with a group of children.

“The school just let you take them?”

“They were happy for any option, glad to be able to tell parents their kids were safely out of the city. Nobody knows what’s coming next. We watched TV for a while when we got here, but the news was making the kids so nervous that I brought them all outside.”

For the rest of their lives, I thought, these kids will remember exactly where they were when the towers came down.

I made spaghetti, and we all listened for the ring of the phone as we ate. One by one the parents checked in, and by bedtime we knew that we were among the lucky ones: Nobody here had lost a relative.

We woke to another eerily radiant day. Parents arrived to claim their kids; our friend John, Julia’s dad, had rented a car in Chicago and driven through the night. He hugged his daughter to him and then tumbled gratefully into bed.

The news was terrible; we all knew people who had been in the Twin Towers, and we sat glued to the television, desperately hoping they had survived. But the immediate danger seemed to have passed; firefighters were pouring into the city, the bridges slowly being reopened. I wandered disconsolately around the house, spooked by this freakishly ordinary country day. Impulsively, I grabbed my car keys.

“I can’t stay here,” I said. “I’m going back.”

Nobody seemed to hear me.

“Back to the city.” I spoke louder. “They’re letting people in again. We’ve got eight kitchens at Gourmet. And somebody’s got to feed the firefighters.”

Michael didn’t miss a beat. “We’ll come too,” he said.

Memo to All Gourmet Staff

The magazine is closed until further notice. But our kitchens are standing idle….This is not a command performance, but I’m going to 4 Times Square to cook for the workers at Ground Zero, and you’re welcome to join me. Buy some groceries and meet me in the morning. It may not be much, but it’s what we can do.

Then I put in a call to Drew Nieporent, the largest personality in the restaurant world, figuring he’d have a plan. When Drew opened Montrachet in 1985, it was the first high-end restaurant in the area that would soon become Tribeca, and he now owned a handful of iconic restaurants that had once stood in the shadow of the Twin Towers: Nobu, Tribeca Grill, Zeppole. Yes, he said, of course he was planning on feeding the rescue workers. We agreed that my crew—whoever they turned out to be—would cook all day and then meet him downtown so we could distribute our food together.

My expectations were low; people were busy comforting their families, and I thought a mere handful of the staff would show up. But when I walked into the kitchens at 9:00 A.M., the place was packed. Word had gone out—Drew, of course—and people were desperate to help. A restaurant PR person showed up with her parents, an ad salesman from GQ came with his kids, and one of the sales reps brought his entire family. In this mad mix of food lovers, half were strangers.

I channeled my inner Larry: You should send everyone who’s not staff away. There are insurance issues. What if someone cuts off his finger? What if someone sues?

Then I silenced the voice: The regular rules did not apply. I cranked up the music, and as the kitchens filled with the scent of chili and chocolate, we began to dance, defiant in the face of disaster.

We all knew why we were there, knew it was as much for ourselves as for the firefighters, knew we were attempting to snatch hope from the rubble of our broken city. And food was the perfect way to do it.

Around five we packed great trays of chili, cornbread, lasagna, and brownies into coolers, loaded them into my van, and headed downtown. We passed a checkpoint at 23rd Street and another at 14th. Down here it was all dust and rubble, growing thicker with each passing block. By the time we reached Canal Street, the streets were no longer passable, and we abandoned the