This is what it was like to work at Windows on the World. An excerpt from DocSoupMan's book, 'The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World'
Photo: Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos “America is a gooood country.” It was a joke, but not really. It’s what the Windows on the World crew said to one another after a heavy night, after turning and burning a station of eight tables with more guests waiting at the door.
Most nights, it was said when tips were paid out, accompanied by handshakes and backslaps and competitive bravado about just how much one had made that night — two hundred dollars, three hundred dollars, five hundred dollars, the number always slightly inflated — and the recognition that, yes, everyone was happy to be there.
“I’m never going to leave this place,” Paulo Villela, a captain and sommelier, would say to his friends on staff. Villela had studied agricultural engineering in his native Brazil but had moved to America in 1983 because his son, Bernardo, had a rare metabolic disease that required care he could find only in the United States. “Windows on the World gave us full benefits. I would have worked there just for the insurance,” he says. “But the money was so good.
New York’s cover story about the restaurant’s opening, from May, 1976. Most of the seventy-three Windows employees working that morning were in the banquet area on the 106th floor, one floor below the main restaurant. The morning was a cherished time, because it was relatively calm. It’s when waiters might help themselves to a generous slice of yesterday’s chocolate cake, if they could get to it.
In the store, the clerk said it wouldn’t take long to get the glasses fixed and his eyes checked. Just twenty minutes, she said. New York City experienced an unfathomable tragedy on September 11, 2001. Windows on the World was one of the worst places to be that morning. None of the one thousand three hundred forty-four people who were above where the first plane crashed into the North Tower survived. The damage suffered that day is most aptly measured by the two thousand nine hundred ninety-six individuals who perished in all the attacks. So many family members and friends lost loved ones.
A planning meeting ahead of the restaurant’s opening. Photo: Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos Many New York restaurants hold a special place in the hearts of the people who cherish them. Windows on the World was one of them, but it was something more. Not only did it become the highest-grossing restaurant in the country during its twenty-five-year existence, it also became a landmark that embodied the city’s greatness.
The paper was frayed and burned around the edges like a cartoon-ish pirate treasure map, but the words were quite legible; scrawled in blue pen, its sender wrote, “I felt as though I died and went to heaven, which I imagine is not too far from the 107th floor!” For five years, Quddus avoided Manhattan, because it was too painful. He remained in Queens, where he worked and helped raise his two young sons with his wife. But when One Dine began hiring, he returned. It was his way of moving on.
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