When Andrew Molen got a Ring alert on his phone earlier this week, he thought someone was breaking into the kitchen of one of the restaurants he runs in Vermont.
It wasn’t until his phone blew up Monday morning that the New York restaurateur realized that Sam’s Steakhouse was under seven feet of water in Ludlow, a picturesque village in the southern part of the granite state that suffered devastating flash floods Monday.
“The water ran right through town,” he said of Ludlow. “This has been a challenging moment for a lot of people.”
“There is severe damage to a lot of houses,” said the chef, who owns five restaurants and a golf course in the village of 2,800 people with business partner Troy Caruso.
Ludlow’s economy is based on tourism and received an influx of new residents from New York during COVID.
Molen, 41, drove to Ludlow from the Hamptons, New York, where he was cooking for a designer — a more than five hour journey.
He arrived Monday night and began cooking for first responders and residents whose homes had been heavily damaged in the region — one of the places hardest-hit by catastrophic storms that hit the state this week.
During the downpour, the village’s roads turned to rivers and residents were forced to abandon their vehicles.
Ludlow recorded more than 5.5 inches of rain during the most catastrophic weather event to hit Vermont since Hurricane Irene hit the region in August, 2011.
“I knew it was raining but I didn’t realize the severity,” he told The Post Tuesday. “The amount of damage is surreal.”
One of the partners’ restaurant, Sam’s Steakhouse is “a total loss” after water poured in. The Fox Run Golf Course they own was inundated. “It will be a month before we can even assess the damage to the golf course,” he told The Post.
A third property was slightly less severely flooded, so may not be lost. “We’re waiting to see if mold sets in in the next 48 to 72 hours on Mr. Darcy’s,” he told The Post.
“I don’t think it has sunk in yet –the level of devastation that has happened. I’m more focused right now on getting through this with the community and building back better. I do feel it’s going to hit sooner rather than later.”
The scale of damage in the town shocked Molen when he arrived after getting past closed roads, but he was able to open one of his kitchens to cook.
The chef trained at his mother Sandra Arcara’s restaurant in New York, and went on to work with celebrity chefs Todd English, Gordon Ramsay and Jean-Georges Vongerichten before launching his own hospitality group. He also oversees Isola on Shelter Island and the Union & Post in Windham, NY.
“We opened our golf course for people who couldn’t go back to their homes and used our ATVs to deliver food,” he said.
“One thing about New Englanders is that they’re tough, good people,” he said. “Watching people walk down the street in their swimsuits and flip flops after the rains, you realize that they just keep going.
“And that’s all that matters, that no lives were lost. Property can be replaced.”
