CLEVELAND — On Monday afternoon, chef Brandon Chrostowski was already back in his Shaker Square restaurant EDWINS as his team prepared for service that evening. But just the day before, he returned home to Northeast Ohio from Israel, where he spent a week cooking and feeding Israelis displaced by the Israel-Hamas War.
Chrostowski says watching the attacks on Oct. 7 was enough to move him to take action, reaching out to his network and to chefs in Israel to connect with efforts on the ground there, like nonprofit Courage Kitchen.
"The world saw what happened on Oct. 7. We saw these attacks — children and women, just terrorism at its finest, really, people being slaughtered," Chrostowski told 3News. "To me, that doesn't sit well. Having a family of four, I didn't want to sit back and do nothing, and I thought the best thing I could do was work with my hands, and that's in the kitchen."
On Sunday the 22nd, he left for Israel and landed in Tel Aviv, where he worked in two kitchens to prepare food to be distributed to victims of the violence and those who've been displaced.
"The first couple days I was working in a very established kitchen with probably 40 volunteers," he said. "We produced the food, they pack it and ship it. It was like a machine. The other kitchen I worked in in the same building was very chef-driven, because most of the restaurants closed for some time, and they would produce food for victims of the massacre."
Chrostowski said while the people he met in Israel are trying to live their daily lives as normally as possible, he also noted that rockets still flew and were shot down overhead, and that cooking would be interrupted by sirens warning people to get to shelter.
From Tel Aviv, he headed south to cook for about 200 people who were displaced from their kibbutz, serving a dinner in a tent and providing a night of normalcy. Chrostowski told us a famous Israeli musician also stopped by to give a performance.
"Cooking that day, a man comes in the kitchen. He says, 'My son, who's maybe 9 or 10, he says he wants to be a chef.' No shoes, nothing. I said, 'Here's a towel, let's go.' He starts cooking, too.
"The spirit of the kitchen was unbelievable, but this setting in the tent — where these 200 people ate, drank, and were just peaceful for a moment — was probably the best dinner I've ever cooked in my entire life."
While Chrostowski says there was a profound sense of gratitude and inspiration while he was there cooking, he also saw the sadness and "sense of insecurity" felt by so many.
"They're vulnerable right now. They were attacked with something they never thought would happen again. They thought they were protected, they thought this would never happen again, and it happened," he explained. "So you have that kind of loss. You have a lot of anger, right? They took lives. You have a ton of sadness."
This isn't the first time Chrostowski has gone to a war zone to cook: In February, WKYC caught up with him after he arrived home from a trip cooking in Ukraine. Through making food and serving people, Chrostowski said he hopes others realize that they can take action to do good.
"The world should know that when something's wrong, everyone can take part in making it better," he said.
Chrostowski is hosting an Israeli Relief Dinner with the Anti-Defamation League of Cleveland on Nov. 2 at 6 p.m. at EDWINS Too, selling tickets to raise money to help affected communities in Israel. For a link to tickets and details, click here.