Surviving WTC restaurant staff starting new eatery

[Miss Mary]

If this group of former Windows on the World employees can't pull of a successful new NYC restaurant, then who could? I wish them well. I never had the pleasure of eating at Windows but I did see it, about to reopen after the 1994 WTC bombing, visible from the inside observation area in the other tower.

Did anyone here at S2K dine at Windows before 9/11?

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http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/01/19/wtc.re ... index.html

Surviving WTC restaurant staff starting new eatery

Place will be called Colors

Wednesday, January 19, 2005 Posted: 8:07 AM EST (1307 GMT)

NEW YORK (AP) -- Workers from the Windows on the World restaurant atop the World Trade Center have signed a lease to create the city's first employee-run restaurant -- only a walk from ground zero.

The workers, 34 immigrants and one U.S.-born partner, are calling their restaurant Colors. It is set to open in Greenwich Village "as soon as possible," said Mamdouh Fekkak, a Moroccan-born waiter.

"The architect is working day and night," he said. "We're so happy!"

Famed for its spectacular views from the 106th floor of the trade center's north tower, Windows on the World was decimated on September 11, 2001. Seventy-three Windows employees died.

Fekkak, 43, now supports two young children while running a catering cooperative that is raising money for the new venture.

"It's been so hard after 9/11, with some people still depressed after years of trying to find work -- odd jobs or a shift in a restaurant here and there," he said.

Another partner, Ataur Rahman, 49, is a Bangladesh-born banquet waiter whose Windows wages approached six figures. Now, he's starting from scratch to support his wife and three children, including a girl born last year.

"Thank God, we have some hope now. ... Good things happen from bad things," he said.

The new restaurant will have a menu featuring American cuisine, with changing specials from each of the 20 countries its owners represent. Each worker will share profits.

The surviving workers -- including waiters, cooks, food runners, busboys and dishwashers -- have been meeting in the tiny Manhattan office of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (ROC), a nonprofit cooperative formed to help workers, mostly immigrants, rebuild their lives.

The cooperative is paying $21,500 a month for the space at 417 Lafayette St., about a 20-minute walk from the trade center site.

It also has raised almost $400,000 for the restaurant, while drawing a major Italian investor -- a consortium of Bologna-based food industry cooperatives that contributed $375,000. The Good Italian Food consortium plans to add another $150,000 when the New York group raises its own half-million -- hopefully from a January 25 Manhattan fund-raiser.

It'll take at least $1 million to start the restaurant, with another $1 million coming from bank loans.

Once it opens, the restaurant will not have any visible sign of the terrorist attack that killed more than 2,700 people at the World Trade Center.

"We will never forget our 73 brothers and sisters, but we don't want people to come and eat at our restaurant because of 9/11," Fekkak said. "People come for pity one time, but they won't come back. We want them to come to Colors because of the food and great atmosphere."

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