As the Los Angeles Wildfires Continue, Restaurants Rise Up

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.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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