World Central Kitchen brings hot meals, love to Buffalo’s grieving East Side food desert

The international food relief organization founded by celebrity chef José Andrés brings hot meals to disaster areas, war zones and places in sudden need of immediate food relief.

WCK served nearly 4 million meals in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017. It spent $135 million to pay restaurants in New York and other high-Covid cities to serve free meals during the pandemic shutdowns. It’s currently providing 250,000 hot meals a day to war refugees in Poland and Ukraine.

And now, World Central Kitchen is in Buffalo. Organizers flew in over the past two weeks to feed a grieving neighborhood whose only supermarket remains closed since a white supremacist shooter killed 10 and injured three people there May 14.

The WCK tents are set up on the corner of Jefferson Avenue and East Utica Street – just down the block from the Tops that was the key source of fresh food for Buffalo’s East Side for the past 19 years.

World Central Kitchen plans to be on site distributing food – including two hot meals a day at around 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. – through June 6 if not longer.

Organizers say Buffalo already stands out among the places they have landed. “We’ve never seen an outpouring of support like this,” said Russell Bremel, special projects manager for World Central Kitchen and a Buffalo native. “It’s incredible.”

Many of the hot meals are being cooked by Chef Darian Bryan of The Plating Society and packed in to-go containers by a crew of volunteers at his Larkin Square kitchen. For one lunch alone, they used more than 400 pounds of chicken and 50 pounds of rice to make 750 servings of sesame chicken, said Chef Spencer Bressette of Fire on the Mountain Co., who is assisting the effort.

WCK has also ordered thousands of meals from local restaurants and arranged for food trucks to park outside the Frank E. Merriweather Jr. Library to serve their specialties. WCK pays the vendors through its donated resources – but many won’t take their money, said Tyler Sodoma, a WCK organizer who flew to Buffalo from New York two days after the shootings.

“We haven’t received this many donations before, ever,” Sodoma said. “Of course we also want to keep the restaurants open, so we order from those that can prepare meals on a large scale. But Buffalo has had this amazing outreach. We go to pay and they say, ‘No, thanks, it’s a donation.’ ”

Among the donors are Wegmans, which provided lunch for 1,000, and LaNova Pizzeria, which sent 200 sheet pizzas. The Anchor Bar’s Williamsville location brought 1,000 wings and Dinosaur BBQ sent pulled pork and salad for 1,000. Chobani’s mobile food pantry gave out 650 cases of yogurt and peanut butter products. Lloyds and Mighty Taco have also sent food trucks, and Kelly Butler of Ice Cream and Chill has brought her truck from Batavia three times so far.

“I came to put smiles on people’s faces,” she said last week as she scooped cups of chocolate, vanilla and the kids’ favorite, blue Cookie Monster. “What’s a better way to do that than ice cream?”

The way World Central Kitchen mobilized in Buffalo shows how the organization quickly taps a network of staff and volunteers to find people in a community who can help and puts them to work getting hot meals to people in need.

Bermel was at a WCK site serving a refugee camp in Poland when he heard about the Tops massacre. “I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, that’s my hometown, we have to go there,’ ” he said.

He knew the neighborhood attacked was a food desert that would need aid for weeks. He called his Williamsville East High School classmate Lauren Celenza, who called her friend Darian Bryan, the local celebrity chef known for his Jamaican roots and trademark fedoras.

“They ask, can we cook 750 meals at a time, twice a day?” Bryan said. “I’m a small operation. We are three people – me, my wife Jessica and my sous chef, DuWayne Harding. I’m like, ‘Can we?’ I say, ‘We can do it.’ And my crew is going, ‘How we going to cook for all these people?’ I say, ‘We’re going to figure it out.’ ”

One of the first meals they cooked – enough spinach fettuccine Alfredo to feed 1,000 – was served by 50 members of the Buffalo Bills and a few members of the Sabres and Bandits who came to comfort their traumatized fans and neighbors.

At the time, Bryan was in the middle of planning his own fundraiser for East Side support, which raised $20,000 at an outdoor event in Larkin Square on May 20.

“It’s been exhausting, but we are doing it,” he said. “I’m usually a tough guy, but when I see all these people walking around just trying to live their lives and then this happens. These people are poor to begin with and then they have to worry about staying alive? I’m serving food to people and I say, ‘Be safe out there,’ and they say, ‘We can’t control that.’ ”

Jessica Bryan has been lining up volunteers to package meals – she has a list of 75 but also called in M&T Bank and Catholic Health, which sent staff to help last week. When they ran out of trays and totes to stack the to-go boxes in, Catholic Health Vice President of Marketing and Public Relations Barbara McManus went shopping for more. 

Bressette said Breva Kitchen also will be preparing hot meals this week. Twice a day, trucks or U-Hauls bring the meals to the corner kitchen where more volunteers hand them out.

Bermel said Buffalo “is the only place we haven’t needed to do formal volunteer outreach. It’s just happened organically in the neighborhood. People ask how they can volunteer and we say, ‘Just show up.’”

In recent days, Lauren Celenza started a Jefferson Community Kids Spot near the WCK tents “to keep kids distracted and away from the road and traffic while this is all going on,” she said. The Kids Spot is providing adult supervision, toys and activities daily and welcomes volunteers. Sign up to help at signupgenius.com/go/70a084dabaf2ea2fa7-jefferson.

The WCK site has become a gathering place for East Side residents to stop by to pick up meals or bags of produce, interact with friendly faces, meet up with neighbors and get some hugs.

Lois Adams paid a visit not planning to accept food, but WCK volunteers persuaded her to take a couple meals and bags of apples. “Initially my reaction was, ‘No thanks, I’ll be OK.’ But this is not going to be an overnight process of getting our store back,” she said.

Amanda O’Banion, who lives on nearby Glenwood Avenue, was there when the Bills visited the WCK site. She called it "the most beautiful thing I have seen in Buffalo."

“It’s been gloomy here since the shootings, but it is uplifting to see everyone coming together in sync and helping a lot of people who have needed help for a long time,” she said.