Something out of nothing

9-11 changed everything, right? For some, it meant rendering the Constitutions "quaint." For others, it transformed them into the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, alternately clutching their pearls in fear and beating their chests in righteous rage.

For one group, though, who were touched most closely by the attack on the World Trade Center, it meant creating something that had not before existed.

There was no bleaker time in New York's history than 9/11. Yet it was then, with the restaurant where he had worked for six years - Windows on the World - in splinters and 73 of his fellow employees gone, that Silverio Moog's dream started to take shape.

Now Mr. Moog, a spunky 41-year-old bartender from the Philippines, can hardly believe what is about to happen. Next week he'll go to work in a brand-new restaurant, and start a totally new life.

Restaurants open in New York all the time, but there has never been one like this. Mr. Moog and 50 other waiters, busboys, bartenders and dishwashers, many of them immigrants who worked at Windows, have formed a cooperative that will run one of the city's first worker-owned restaurants.

Each one of them will claim a piece of the restaurant, called Colors, as their own and share in any profits. Each one submitted a family recipe to help shape the restaurant's eclectic menu - which they describe as American fare with a global twist. And each one has pinned lifelong dreams on an idea formed in the crucible of disaster.

[...]

Mr. Mailvaganam realizes this is no ordinary job. "What we are trying to do here is start a restaurant with a conscience," he told two dozen co-op members who gathered last week for a final training session. While he spoke, spacklers and carpenters rushed to complete their work. The restaurant, in Lower Manhattan a few doors down from the Public Theater, is scheduled to open for dinner on Tuesday. "It's challenging," Mr. Mailvaganam said over the din of steel and wood, "but we are committed to doing it."

Rarely has one project had to carry so many expectations. Besides memorializing the 73 who died in Windows, which was atop 1 World Trade Center, the co-op is trying to do no less than change an industry.

Nobody in the restaurant, not even the dishwashers, will receive less than $13.50 an hour, far higher than average restaurant wages. They will share tips and be eligible to receive overtime and vacations. Eventually they will be covered by health insurance and have pensions.

It takes a group of immigrants, restaurant workers no less, in the heart of that city known to so many as a latter day Sodom, to turn the horrors of the World Trade Center attacks into something positive, however small it may be.

Who knows if the restaurant will succeed; six out of ten don't make it in New York. But Madame Cura and I will be dining there soon, we hope.