| Colors | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Restaurant information | |
| City | New York City |
| State | New York |
| Country | United States |
Colors was a 70-seat restaurant in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City.
The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center destroyed the popular Windows on the World restaurant, and, when many of its former workers remained unemployed a non-profit started a restaurant named Colors to employ them, while upgrading their skills. [1] [2]
Former employees of the Windows on the World restaurant opened Colors in 2006, with the support of the non-profit Restaurant Opportunities Center. [3] The restaurant closed its original location in 2017. [1] [2] The New York Times , and other publications, reported that ROC had problems fulfilling its ideals of worker empowerment, reporting difficulties like workers quitting over not being paid on time. [4] [5]
Celebrated Cordon Bleu chef Sicily Sewell was hired to oversee the kitchen in a re-opened Colors in the fall of 2019. [2] [6] When the newly reopened restaurant was shutdown one month later Sewell was critical of management, who had failed to inform employees that they saw the reopening as a "test run". [7]
Windows on the World was a complex of dining, meeting, and entertainment venues on the top floors of the North Tower of the original World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan.
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Sicily Sewell is an American chef, restaurateur, television producer, and former actress. She is sometimes credited in film or television as simply with a mononym Sicily. Following the birth of two daughters, Sewell became a restaurateur.
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The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC) is a not-for-profit organization and worker center with affiliates in a number of cities across the United States. Its mission is to improve wages and working conditions for the nation's low wage restaurant workforce. Its tactics and strategy have drawn fire from business groups and restaurant industry lobbyists.
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At the restaurant COLORS on the Lower East Side, they gathered Wednesday, just as they have for 18 years - a family forever connected by 9/11. The place was founded by surviving employees of the Windows on the World restaurant, which sat at the top of the World Trade Center's North Tower.
Colors — the rocky restaurant that opened in 2006 by surviving Windows on the World employees after the September 11 terrorist attacks — will reopen this October on the Lower East Side after closing in 2017, AMNY reports.
Increasing wages for food service workers is certainly a noble cause, one that aligned with the ideals of Colors when it first opened, in 2006. But good intentions are one thing; running a restaurant in a city as competitive as New York is quite another.
The flagship COLORS New York location is now closed for service, but even as COLORS was failing to turn a profit, ROC was actively hoisting COLORS as a model restaurant and attacking other restaurateurs for the way they conducted themselves.
Sewell-Johnson, who began cooking professionally after more than 15 years as an actor, ultimately wanted to create a deeply personal restaurant for the community. Her family has been in the business for generations: She owned a Berkeley restaurant with her mother, her aunt owned a restaurant in Chicago, and seven generations ago, one of her maternal forebears was the enslaved head cook on a Tennessee plantation.
Staff found out about the news during dinner service at around 8 p.m. on Thursday, when the restaurant's chef, Sicily Sewell-Johnson, was informed via text that the restaurant would have to close. It was a sudden ending to what Sewell-Johnson describes as a tumultuous experience. 'As far as structure, we never had that,' she tells Grub. 'It was like a constant fight.' -