Meet the New York City chefs who kept Ground Zero workers fueled after the 9/11 attacks

Chef Don Pintabona spent years cooking up the finest dishes for celebrities, Wall Street brokers and other VIPs at the Tribeca Grill in downtown Manhattan, but nothing could have prepared him and the rest of the city’s restaurant community for their biggest job.

In the hours after the World Trade Center was attacked and destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001, Pintabona said he and many other chefs, caters, food service workers and others all yearned to help the city in some capacity with their skills, but didn’t immediately know how.

But through quick thinking, organizing and the generosity of thousands New Yorkers, Pintabona and the other restaurant members put together 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 since the attacks, the memories of those weeks are still fresh, as is the sense of awe at how they put the operation together.

Turning the page on a tragedy

Pintabona said he had a desire to do something after the attacks to help the city, but it was a little piece of paper that came to him serendipitously that sparked his idea for the operation.

On Sept. 11, he said he watched the destruction of the towers from the roof of his home in Brooklyn, which was so close that pieces of paper debris from the towers were floating in the air near him.

One of those was a “P” page from a dictionary and when Pintabona picked it up he said he noticed that one side of the page had words with negative connotations, such as pesky, while the other side had words such as persevere, perseverance, persistence.

“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.

“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.”

Pintabona said the next day he was able to get to his restaurant, and he started cooking with what he had in his kitchen. He then brought the food to Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan, which was 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.

Pintabona said he wanted to continue to feed more people but transporting the meals through the streets, which were damaged and restricted to first responders and the National Guard, would be a challenge. 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.

A crew assembles, quickly gets into action

Pintabona told ABC News he found that that other chefs in the city were also interested in feeding the Ground Zero workers and they all put their heads together.

He soon started calling up several contacts within the food industry, the city government and the owner of Spirit Cruises, which operated city sightseeing and party cruises lines, and things quickly began to fall in place.

Spirit provided three boats, one at Chelsea Piers that would be used to cook and prepare the meals, another to transport the food to Ground Zero, and a third, a triple decker, stationed in Battery Park City near the pit that was used for the workers to eat and rest.

The city’s top chefs, such as Charlie Palmer, Danny Meyer and Daniel Boulud, and food workers and volunteers would be doled out with tasks with everything from cutting veggies to organizing forks, spoons and plates.

Jim Stewart, a longtime food service coordinator who had experience coordinating food operations at the Meadowlands and other big clients, jumped in when Pintabona made the calls for help. Stewart said he too was 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, which 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, but that was all eaten within three days.

Fortunately, they weren’t the only New Yorkers who were 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 out 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, you know what they’re used to.”

Megan Murphy was a full time bartender at Rue 51 in Manhattan on Sept. 11 and she told ABC News she immediately answered Stewart’s call. She helped to serve the food and coordinate with other volunteers right at the pit.

“It was my call to duty,” Murphy, 51, told ABC News while holding back tears. ” I had been doing something because I was helpless. I felt helpless and I just wanted to help. I just want to be…I just needed to be there.”

‘Nourishing more than their stomachs’

By Sept. 14, the operation had kicked off and the volunteers were ready to go and the first set of food was delivered to the pit.

The boats would sail from Chelsea Piers nearly 2 1/2 miles south to Ground Zero with a team of volunteers and return back for another round and the operation would continue 24/7.

Workers still had soot on them and looked liked they hadn’t slept in days but they gladly accepted the meals and cherished the time to step away from the terrible scene.

Pintabona said massage therapists joined in on the volunteering and provided the crews with free massages to ease their muscles.

He said the meals definitely helped the pit workers have the energy to push through with their work, but the chefs and volunteers all felt that their service meant a lot more than a free lunch.

“You’d see the looks on the faces of people that came in, if they’d been on the pile for God knows how many hours and starving and then they got to sit in a clean environment and then talk to other first responders,” he said.

“So that was the most amazing part of the effort,” he added, “[It] kind of nourished a lot more than just stomachs.”

Murphy, who continued to bartend at night during her volunteer time, said that many who came down to help went beyond just serving food and in many cases offered the pit crews a place to unwind and let out their raw emotions.

“I would make an effort just to go to everyone and talk to them, and let them talk to me about the experience,” she said.

“If after lunch they could walk out and I could walk out with them and they were smiling and getting off their shift and made it a better day, that was what I was there to do,” Murphy added.

The volunteers and chefs said that while they pushed forward with the operation, with some sleeping on the boats, the stress and hard work did compound.

Fortunately, the volunteers had each other’s backs, according to Pintabona and Stewart.

“It got so ridiculous that one day Jimmy was working the phones and, you know I just had this stupid, selfish craving for a Krispy Kreme doughnut,” Pintabona recalled.

“I said, ‘All right, let’s call this guy.’ We called them, and the next day a whole truck with like 20 rolling racks of Krispy Kreme donuts showed up,” Stewart said. “So [Pintabona] looked at me and was like, I should have known better.”

Looking back 25 years later

The operation ended after roughly two months and roughly a million meals after the Red Cross came in and took care of meals for the Ground Zero pit crew. But Pintabona said that the crew didn’t grow apart.

He organized a Christmas party at Cipriani in Soho for all of the volunteers and their families and many stayed in touch in the last 25 years.

Stewart said he was humbled by the outpouring of support from not only New Yorkers, but people throughout the world who heard about the feeding operation and were moved.

“I have these pictures that were sent to me from a class where the children, they drew cartoons,” he recalled. “They said like, ‘Keep going. You’re doing great.’ You know, ‘thank you for your efforts.'”

Murphy said that she is still emotional thinking back to the weeks after the attacks, but the memories of selfless New Yorkers always stand out.

“New York is strong, New Yorkers are strong,” she said.

Pintabona agreed and said for him it all came back to that floating dictionary page and that push to persevere.

“You have to turn the page and stay on the positive side. So that’s kind of what I’ve learned through this experience,” he said.