Restaurant Owners Feed the Needy on Holiday : They Close Doors to Public, Serve Hungry Families and Senior Citizens

Fred Deni, Piero Biondi, Rita Zeid and Dennis Mangan and Allan Dichner never have met, but they have something in common. They are restaurant owners who close their doors to the public on Thanksgiving Day and serve special free dinners to needy families and senior citizens.

“I wish we could interest more people in doing this,” said Deni, owner of Back on Broadway restaurant in Santa Monica. “Because we just can’t handle all the people who really are in need, including whole families who have nowhere to go on Thanksgiving. I’m not talking about street people. I’m talking about whole families. It is truly sad to think that an entire family doesn’t have an extra $20 to make a holiday meal.”

Deni, an actor turned restaurateur, began his special Thanksgiving dinners in his home 14 years ago for five people, theatrical friends of his who were unemployed or had no family in California.

“It was a dinner that just kept growing,” Deni explained. “The last year at the house--1978--there were 97 people, and I do not live in a mansion. It took me two days to clean the house. I decided then that I would invite the same people the next year, but this time they were going to work and serve others who really needed it. The first year we did it, everybody said it was the best Thanksgiving ever.”

Deni’s free Thanksgiving feast has since become a tradition in Santa Monica. Last year he fed 1,847 people at his restaurant, which seats about 90 people at one time, in two small inside rooms and outside on an enclosed patio.

“The need is there,” he said. “We could probably have as many as 3,000, but we don’t have the space. This year we’ll limit it to about 1,100 here, and we’ll be sending dinners for about 150 to the Bible Tabernacle Center in Venice.”

‘Really Trying Hard’

For today’s dinner, Deni has invited groups from the Israel Levin Center for Senior Citizens, the Santa Monica Senior Citizens Center, the Ocean Park Community Services Center, and Project Return, an educational and vocational center for adults recovering from mental illness.

“I picked Project Return because these people are really trying hard to reenter society and people discriminate against them,” Deni said. “There’s a restaurant here in Santa Monica where some of the Project Return people went for dinner one evening and the owner wouldn’t serve them. He just refused. You have to remember that mental illness isn’t chic. I was so angry when I heard that, I called and invited them to lunch here.”

All this week, Deni has been receiving donations from private citizens and will use some of the money to provide additional dinners to needy persons. The rest he plans to donate to Project Return.

“People have been showing up with checks this week and I’m thrilled,” he said. “They’ve just been stopping by. There was one man, a developer, who was going to underwrite part of the dinner so we could add more people, but then he died. I couldn’t believe an angel showed up out of the blue and then he was gone. This week, his estate sent a check. Isn’t that great?”

Assistance Needed

Early in November, Deni had put out the word that he needed assistance and asked if any Westside restaurant owners would be willing to serve some needy groups. Deni said he would make any arrangements for as many as the restaurant could serve. He got no offers.

“Most restaurants are open on Thanksgiving. It’s a big day for them,” he said. “I just never fell into the category of a family restaurant and I never wanted to. But this is different. No one who’s come and enjoyed our Thanksgiving has ever returned and said, ‘Can I have a free meal today?’ I think most restaurateurs are afraid of that. But it’s never happened here.”

For Thanksgiving, Deni’s friends, acquaintances and customers volunteer to wait tables along with the restaurant’s regular staff. So far, 75 have signed up to help serve today’s dinner, starting at noon.

Deni estimates he’ll be serving about 500 pounds of turkey, along with all the trimmings and pumpkin pie for dessert.

“Burt and Louie Mazer, who own the Chef’s Annex on Pico in West Los Angeles, called and volunteered to let us use their big luxury oven to roast the turkeys,” Deni said. “That’s really much better for us because that oven will bake 25 turkeys at a time. They’re the only ones who called. But maybe there will be more next year.

“People say, ‘Why do you do this?’ And I say that feeding people is what’s paying my rent and for my car,” Deni added. “This is my way of giving back. There are some tear-jerker stories, and you should see the thank-you letters we get. Last year, a father came with his three children. They spent all day here because they had nowhere else to go. He came up to me afterwards and he was crying. He kept saying ‘thank you, we wouldn’t have had a Thanksgiving dinner without you.’ That’s what makes me do this.”

For 14 years, Piero Biondi has been serving free Thanksgiving dinners to needy people in the Burbank area. He started out feeding groups of underprivileged children, but seven years ago switched to a holiday dinner for the elderly.

Last year he fed 160 senior citizens at two seatings. This year about 60 senior citizens from the Joslyn Adult Center in Burbank will be guests at Piero’s Seafood House for traditional turkey dinners as well as some of Biondi’s special Italian dishes.

Only One Seating

“This year we’re not having as many, just the one seating,” Biondi said, “because my wife, Marie, wanted me to come for Thanksgiving dinner at home. This will be my first Thanksgiving at home in 15 years. Then next year we’ll go back to the two seatings.”

Six of Biondi’s regular customers have volunteered to wait tables for the afternoon dinner. Entertainment will also be provided.

Biondi, who came to the United States from Italy in 1955, said he can relate to the seniors because he remembers what it was like to be alone and poor, as many of them are.

“I know what poverty is, what loneliness is,” he said last week. “I was 15 when I came here and I didn’t speak English. I didn’t know anyone and had nobody to turn to. I had an uncle in Washington, D.C. But the worst part was when I got off the ship in New York, there was nobody to meet me.

“I went to Washington and walked up and down Connecticut Avenue asking for a job as a dishwasher, a busboy. Nobody wanted me. Then a chef at Gusti’s said I could start mopping floors there. I got paid $15 a week and worked from 6 a.m. to 10 at night, and lived in my uncle’s basement.”

Biondi moved to Los Angeles in 1959 and in 1965 opened his seafood house. He moved his parents to Burbank from their home in Italy in 1965, his two brothers in 1967.

In addition to running his restaurant, Biondi has a weekly radio show on KIEV called “Chef Piero’s Kitchen.”

“You talk to some of the people who come and they’re so grateful,” Biondi said. “I do this for them for Thanksgiving because it means in my small way I can say thank you for all I’ve got.

“Some day, things are going to come back and haunt America because we don’t take care of our young and our old. You’ve got to remember the old, who gave all they had while they were young and able. It’s sad. We give so much money to foreign aid, to people we don’t even know. And then you hear about some older person who died in this country because his heat was turned off because he couldn’t pay the bill.”

By Monday, Priscilla Yablon, activities director of the Freda Mohr Multi-Service Center on Fairfax Avenue, had signed up 81 senior citizens for a special Thanksgiving dinner at the Roll and Rye restaurant in Culver City. Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky’s office had donated the use of two buses to transport the guests from the center and back.

“This is wonderful for our people,” Yablon said of the seniors from the Freda Mohr center. “Most of the people here are very elderly, frail and low income. They’re really alone, too. Many of their children are gone from the area or even have died. They don’t have families to be with and the center is closed that day.”

Flowers All Around

Roll and Rye owner Rita Zeid opens her restaurant to the public for Thanksgiving breakfast, then closes to entertain the seniors during the afternoon. In addition to dinner and dancing, Zeid gives long-stemmed red roses to the women, carnation boutonnieres to the men.

“I do this because I like people and I have a certain empathy for older people who have nowhere to go during the holidays,” said Zeid, who is spending her third consecutive Thanksgiving entertaining the elderly. She bought the restaurant from her father three years ago.

“We have 30 people who have volunteered to wait tables--doctors, dentists, lawyers, everybody,” said Dennis Mangan, co-owner of Alden’s restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in Encino. “This is our second year of owning the restaurant, and my partner, Allan Dichner, and I agreed when we opened that we’d do something for the senior citizens. And the whole community is behind us.”

Mangan, his wife, Shari, and partner Dichner will be entertaining 160 senior citizens from three downtown Los Angeles senior-citizen residences.

“We have people donating time and money for this,” said Mangan. “And we’re trying to get enough money to buy a used piano for the seniors at Angelus Plaza. All the seniors here are ones with low incomes, and they don’t have any families. Greyhound is donating four buses to pick them up downtown and bring them out for the afternoon. We hire a singer and a magician, have linen and fresh flowers on the tables and serve a turkey dinner with all the trimmings and hot apple cider and homemade apple pie.

Harry Hirakawa, manager of the senior citizens residence at 740 S. Olive St., was impressed with the raves his senior residents gave to Mangan’s and Dichner’s holiday feast last year. This year, he said, 35 had signed up to go.

“Most of our residents have family close by or they’re invited out by friends,” Hirakawa said, explaining that his building houses 346 seniors. “Some don’t want to mix, but the ones who go have a good time. It’s nice for them to get out for a holiday. I hear it’s some party that the boys give. It would be nice if more people would do that.”