By Michelle Garcia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 11, 2006; A03
NEW YORK -- That eager waiter hovering around isn't just hoping for a generous tip. The bartender with the big, bright smile deeply cares that his cocktail concoction hits all the right buttons. Indeed the entire staff at Colors behaves as if their very livelihood, their personal success, rests on your happiness, because it does.
Busboys, waiters and sous-chefs all have a stake in this new Greenwich Village restaurant, which labor activists believe is the city's first worker-owned restaurant. And for the crew, Colors is a kind of a rebirth. Most of the owners once worked at Windows on the World, the legendary restaurant atop the World Trade Center where 73 of their colleagues died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
True to its name, Colors offers a menu that blends American cuisine with the worldly tastes of the mostly immigrant proprietors who hail from more than 20 countries. There is Philippine lobster lumpia and Haitian-style stewed conch. A world map etched in glass adds a modern touch to the pre-World War II decor.
"For the immigrant, his dream is to open his own restaurant," said Mamdouh Fekkak, 44, a former waiter's captain at Windows on the World, who dreamed up the restaurant idea. "It's going to be a model to show how to do a profitable restaurant while you're taking care of your workers."
Wages start at $13 an hour, far above the prevailing wage at other local restaurants. The owner-workers tolerate none of the top-down bullying they say is common in the industry. Colors is that relatively rare high-end New York restaurant where diversity of looks and accents is celebrated in the front of the house, not hidden away in the kitchen.
Still, when Colors opened last month, the newly minted owners relished a range of triumphs that in the past four years included overcoming weak financial support and infighting among the workers.
Although most of the co-op members lost their restaurant jobs after the attacks, Colors was left out of the rebuilding of downtown Manhattan. Local government entities charged with distributing federal funds to revive the area around Ground Zero declined to give the workers any assistance, forcing them to scramble for several years to piece together the $2.2 million in loans and grants to launch the restaurant.
The result was a financial burden so big that it led to an internal rupture that shook the collective membership, forcing many to walk away, saying they could not afford to keep waiting.
"They said they want to build an empire," said Behzad Pasdar, a leader of the dissident group. "We wanted a place that we could open up and start working. "
Finding OpportunitiesThe workers lost many friends when the twin towers crashed. Some, such as Sekou Siby, a former cook who survived, drifted away. He started driving a cab, avoided crowds and friends, including his old co-workers.
"I didn't want to be reminded about the loss," he said, in the clipped French accent of his native Ivory Coast.
Months passed and Siby, whose long, lean frame seems designed for the high-intensity of restaurant work, missed the camaraderie of the kitchen. He learned of a union-run workers' center in Lower Manhattan. There he met Saru Jayaraman, a daughter of Indian immigrants and an Ivy League-educated lawyer who was helping displaced restaurant workers apply for relief funds. He also found many of his old co-workers from Windows on the World.
The center grew into the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, which they called ROC-NY, becoming an advocacy group for restaurant workers with Jayaraman as executive director. ROC-NY has protested outside of some of New York's ritziest restaurants to force them to pay back wages to kitchen workers.
ROC's one-room office is adorned with posters of Mahatma Gandhi and Che Guevara, and it once listed a $25 bullhorn as its sole taxable asset. But ROC members also had a dream of their own: They wanted to open a high-end, worker-owned restaurant.
"We know from the beginning it's not going to be easy," said Fekkak, a Moroccan immigrant well versed in the Darwinian nature of the restaurant business. "We're a group of immigrants that have no money, no power."
The workers applied in 2004 for help from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp, the powerful city-state organization that oversees the rebuilding of downtown. The corporation has given $40 million to persuade the Bank of New York to remain downtown and $3 million to underwrite actor Robert De Niro's Tribeca Film Festival. But corporation officials only last year set aside money for community groups such as ROC-NY, and to date those funds have not been awarded.
Without funding, the workers abandoned leases for two desirable sites near Ground Zero. "When we talk about September 11th, we talk about us," said Siby, who later became a paid organizer with ROC-NY. "We wanted to . . . get back jobs in the same community."
It took the help of a foreign company to kick-start their project. Good Italian Foods, a Bologna, Italy-based workers cooperative, agreed to invest $500,000 in Colors. The Nonprofit Finance Fund helped find $1.2 million in loans, and ROC kicked in the rest with grants that it had secured from foundations.
Jayaraman and a majority of workers voted to require that every member of their collective "buy" their share of the restaurant by investing 100 hours of sweat equity, to be earned by volunteering with a catering service or attending labor protests.
"It's not really a tough thing to do. You're not going to be carrying bricks on your back," said Magdi Labib, 51, a former Windows on the World captain who says he took a cut in pay from another restaurant where he worked as a waiter to join the fledgling Colors. "Everybody is doing whatever it takes."
But those demands, and the collective's insistence on deferring profits to create future restaurants, rankled other members who joined a growing dissident group. Nearly half of the approximately 30-member group walked away saying they could not afford to keep waiting for a dream.
The split also exposed class and language fissures. The core of ROC's remaining members were U.S. citizens or green-card holders who spoke English and were well educated. Most of the dissidents spoke little English, lacked legal immigration documents and labored in the lower rungs of the restaurant business.
Sparking ProtestsLast year, Jayaraman warned that Spanish-language translation of ROC meetings would come to an end. Everyone needed to learn to speak English. Some members argued that that contradicted the group's egalitarian spirit and left in protest.
Next came the board's decision that every worker-owner needed a green card.
Thousands of undocumented workers labor in the city's restaurants and that decision fell like a hammer blow on members such as Jaime Alvarez, who delivered food to the World Trade Center on the day of the terrorist attacks.
"What I wanted is the original promise, a co-op," said Alvarez, who still carries the entrance slip to the World Trade Center from that day's delivery. "They don't tell people the truth -- they can be part of the restaurant, but they must be legal."
Alvarez and others said they joined ROC with the promise that one day the collective would sponsor them for a green card.
Jayaraman insisted that owners need legal working papers and no one can promise a green card.
For now, the two groups of former comrades have gone their own ways. The dissidents hope to open their own catering service. Meanwhile, the workers collective has replaced the dissidents, and its now 50 members include 35 who once worked at Windows on the World.
Together, they decided on a menu, plump with ethnic-flavored dishes that run from $18 to more than $30. A committee worked with an interior designer to construct an art deco decor of fine woods and frosted light fixtures. Selecting a chef required a consensus of the group, which meant sampling their offerings and engaging in lengthy discussions.
But the result is a finely tuned floor staff. A guest's needs draw quick attention from the nearest worker who is also an owner.
A medley of Jamaican hip-hop, dance, Caribbean music filled the dining room of half-moon booths and tables scattered in the dimly lit dining room.
Magdi Labib, now the maitre d' at Colors, escorted his guests to the hip bar area and with a wave of his arm said, "Anywhere you like, you have the power." It appears, after so many years, that they finally do, too.