On the Tuesday morning in January when Los Angeles began to burn, the Santa Ana winds whipped hard at Courtney Storer’s driveway gate, at the edge of the city’s East Side, yanking open the wooden doors. A crop of cypress trees behind her house leaned eastward in the gusts, as if trying to escape something; weeks later, the trees remain bent. Storer, who is forty-one, with honey-colored hair that she tends to wear piled on her head, was once the culinary director of the L.A. Italian restaurant Jon & Vinny’s. In recent years, she has worked as a private chef and as a co-executive producer and a culinary producer, on the TV show “The Bear,” which her brother Christopher Storer created. That evening, as Storer drove to dinner on the West Side, she saw the flames of the Pacific Palisades Fire in the distance. When she started getting calls about a second fire, in Eaton Canyon, just ten miles north of her neighborhood, she cut her night short.
Back at home, smoke hung heavily in the air. A few blocks away, Storer’s friend Sarah Hymanson, the co-chef and co-owner of the beloved restaurant Kismet, had lost power, and she came over to stash some prized meat in Storer’s freezer: rib eyes and a strip steak from a small farm in San Diego County that had butchered only a few cows the previous season. The next morning, Storer drove to Altadena—an area bordering Eaton Canyon that’s long been a haven for middle-class Black families and has recently attracted the young and upwardly mobile—to help another friend evacuate and hose down her home. “It was terrifying,” Storer told me, “but, in that moment, I was, like, I know what we’re capable of doing.” In the catering kitchen in her garage, where she preps for events that usually max out at around fifty guests, she began to make what would become hundreds of meals a day: pounds and pounds of meatballs and penne, tossed in her signature red sauce.
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“Neighbors were holding things in their fridges. I was, like, ‘Can you put this in your oven?’ It was crazy,” she said. She gathered a team of twenty volunteers, among them her friend Dave Rueda, who lives next door and comes from a family of firefighters: six of his relatives are on the force, and, in addition to jumping in on prep, he helped Storer find firefighting units in need of food. Several days in, Storer moved the operation to bigger digs—the Ruby Fruit, in Silver Lake, a self-described “strip mall wine bar for the Sapphically inclined.” On a recent morning, I found her there, bounding around in an energized state of disbelief, checking on trays of slow-roasting carrots and scrawling cheerful notes to be packaged with meals. “We keep saying we’re flying the plane as we’re building it,” Storer said. Madison Martin, a former Jon & Vinny’s colleague who was helping to run strategy, laughed and said, “Plane took off, like, a couple of days ago.”
Storer had signed up with World Central Kitchen, the José Andrés-run organization that collaborates with local chefs to provide food relief during disasters, and her contacts there were offering some directive, but the breadth of needs was as wide and variegated as the city itself. There were first responders hungry after long, demanding shifts; there were people sleeping in shelters, in their cars, or on the street; there were others bouncing among hotels and Airbnbs and the couches of friends and family. Some needed food urgently, and some were strapped for cash, or a kitchen, or both. Others simply needed one less thing to think about. Martin was on a text thread that linked Angelenos—many of them, like her, creative freelancers—who were buffeting the work of organizations such as the Hollywood Food Coalition and the N.A.A.C.P., distributing food to relief centers and individual families. The efforts resembled a citywide meal train, the kind strung together by Excel spreadsheet when someone has a baby.
At a grocery giveaway hosted by the cookbook author Molly Baz, who lost her house, in Altadena, I met a woman in her forties named Karine (Gar) Ceyhan, who had lived in the area for a decade and had lost her home, too. She was an avid cook, and the kitchen had been her sanctuary. “I drank wine while I cooked, but I didn’t need the alcohol—I just needed my kitchen,” she said. The night the fire began, she made what would be her last meal there: meatballs and bucatini in a Marcella Hazan tomato sauce. She could restock her pantry, but some of what she’d lost was irreplaceable, including the only copy of a cookbook she’d written, by hand, in honor of her late father.
In the parking lot of Altadena’s Eagles Hall, which was functioning as a makeshift relief center, I met Katie Rose Summerfield, a thirtysomething actor, musician, and writer whose home in Pasadena had been severely damaged by smoke. At the hotel where she'd gone after evacuating, she had taken it upon herself to make sure that the people in the rooms around hers were being fed; weeks later, though they’d all dispersed, she was still at it, coördinating deliveries from Feed the Streets L.A., a nonprofit that provides meals and supplies to the city’s unhoused population. That day, she was reuniting with Anthony Soza, a tall, burly man in his forties who lived in Altadena with his wife and their six daughters, plus their two dogs. After hotel costs became too expensive, they’d moved into a shelter.
Summerfield took containers of chicken, rice, and beans for herself and two single mothers she’d met at the hotel; Soza grabbed a stack of Domino’s pizzas for his family. “One thing that I’m noticing with this is you just take it day by day,” he said. “Every day has its own obstacles—hope for the best and expect the worst.” Overhead, a flock of green parrots fluttered and squawked in humanlike tones. Across the street sat the charred shell of a car; a stray ember during the fires had set it aflame yet spared all the buildings around it. Soza pointed out a stretch of evergreens known as Christmas Tree Lane, a signature Altadena attraction. “I look like an outsider,” he said—his shaved scalp and face are covered in tattoos—yet he’d found the area, his home for ten years, unusually welcoming. “When I came out here, the cops never harassed me. None of my neighbors ever harassed me.”
This past August, I moved to Los Angeles after two decades in New York. It happened fast; my husband got a job offer too good to turn down, and our son was about to start kindergarten. In the months before the fires, I’d been feeling adrift and disoriented, craving the sense of place, comfort, and familiarity I had taken for granted in New York. As entire neighborhoods were incinerated, as ash rained from the sky, I felt an overwhelming desire to bolt. But, in the weeks that followed, the more time I spent with people figuring out how to help and be helped, the more grounded I felt. A city that I had perceived as foreign and opaque seemed to open up and invite me in.
A friend introduced me to Danny Khorunzhiy, one of three co-owners of Cafe Tropical, a decades-old Cuban coffee shop and lunch counter on Sunset Boulevard. Khorunzhiy, a thirty-nine-year-old with the mustache and the swagger of a nineteen-seventies movie star, had never imagined himself as a restaurateur, but as a recovering addict he had spent a lot of time in Tropical’s back room, which was used for A.A. and other meetings. After the café’s previous owners announced, in 2023, that they intended to close the restaurant, Khorunzhiy, a program director at a drug-and-alcohol treatment center, was surprised to find himself rounding up partners, all with connections to the recovery community, and taking over. “The first meeting I came to was here, nineteen years ago,” he told me. “There’s a lot of spaces that exist, but how many spaces are there that people come to and they change their lives?”
Khorunzhiy had long been involved with Feed the Streets, the nonprofit that aids the homeless. Cooking for people displaced by the fires was a natural extension of that work. The first call for volunteers to help make breakfast burritos, sandwiches, and cookies drew a line that snaked around the block. “It was like Club Tropical,” Esme Edwards, Feed the Streets’ twenty-eight-year-old executive director, said, laughing.
Three evenings a week, after the café’s normal operations have ended, Khorunzhiy and his colleagues have been making meals to drop off, along with donations from other businesses, at Eagles Hall. On a recent afternoon, Khorunzhiy was distributing cartons of fried rice and fortune cookies from Genghis Cohen, a Chinese restaurant in West Hollywood, as well as an entire pallet of oat milk from Erewhon, which he wasn’t sure would have any takers. A man in a pickup truck approached and explained that his house was intact but uninhabitable, because of water damage, and that he was sleeping in the driveway in his truck—“like a security guard.” He accepted a case of the oat milk with a shrug and said, “It will be my first time trying it!”
Another day, at a Home Depot in Cypress Park, a working-class neighborhood on the East Side, I met a chef named Camila Casañas, who was carting dozens of steak-and-bean burritos into the parking lot. Hand-painted signs affixed to parked trucks advertised demolition services and trash hauling. A large yellow billboard reading “WORKERS AVAILABLE” had been installed by the Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California (IDEPSCA), an organization that operates a job center there, helping day laborers and domestic workers find employment and informing them of their rights. It was Casañas’s second time delivering free meals to the lot since the fires began. “There’s a lot of conversations of, like, ‘It’s just rich people who lost their homes in the Palisades,’ ” she said. “No, there’s a whole network beyond that of people who make that economy go.” Casañas takes pride in making excellent food, “even en masse, even in times of crisis.” The previous week, she’d brought sandwiches layered with slow-cooked brisket, which she’d brined in smoked salt and foraged pink peppercorns—a supplier in the Bay Area had sent her five hundred pounds of meat, and she was working through it slowly.
Next to a cluster of picnic tables, a woman was pulling complimentary espresso drinks from a coffee cart called Cherry Brew. A group of a dozen or so men dressed in workwear and speaking Spanish waited in line for lattes and cappuccinos. Jorge Giron, an IDEPSCA employee who helps run the job center, beckoned to them to get burritos. “Come, jefes,” Giron said warmly; he knew many of the men by name. I asked him if there had been more laborers in search of work since the fires. “Since Trump came into town, not that many,” he said. “The ICE presence has really deterred people from showing up.” Even in the brief interlude between the fires and the Inauguration, numbers were down, he said, because of poor air quality. Yet he was sure that they’d soon be on the front lines of the city’s recovery process. “We’ve gotten a lot of that,” his colleague Paulo Suarez said. “People coming and asking for day laborers to clean the ashes.” ♦
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