When Katie Lee Biegel first encountered the nonfiction book about Windows on the World that would inspire the CNN documentary short Top of the World, she was still co-hosting Food Network‘s The Kitchen, which came to an end last year after its 40-season run.
Chef Marc Murphy, who had worked at the restaurant atop the World Trade Center, gave Biegel and her co-hosts copies of Tom Roston’s The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World when he was a guest on the culinary talk show hosted by Biegel, Sunny Anderson, Alex Guarnaschelli, Jeff Mauro and Geoffrey Zakarian.
“I started reading it in my dressing room between segments, and I was like, ‘Wow, this book is so captivating!’ And I couldn’t put it down,” Biegel recalls. “So I gave it to my husband [Somebody Feed Phil producer Ryan Biegel] when I finished it, and he was the same as me. He read it in like two days, and for a couple of years, we just kept saying to each other, ‘That should really be a documentary.’ And then about three-and-a-half years ago, Ryan said, ‘I’m going to do this. We’ve talked about it long enough.’”
The resulting documentary short, Top of the World, from RBG and Julia directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen, which premieres on CNN on Labor Day before streaming on CNN’s app and CNN.com and received a limited theatrical run in New York from Aug. 28-Sept. 3, aims to tell the story of the people — including chef Michael Lomonaco and restaurateur Joe Baum — behind Windows on the World, the restaurant that occupied the 106th and 107th floors of the north tower of the World Trade Center, over its 25-year history ahead of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in which 79 Windows employees and 91 guests were among the nearly 3,000 people who died.
Working with their CAA agents, Katie Lee and Ryan Biegel linked up with Time and Tribeca Studios on the project, after getting interest from nearly a dozen production companies, with Time’s past work on documentaries about historic moments making it seem like a good fit and Tribeca bringing its own connection to downtown New York and 9/11. And both Katie Lee and Ryan Biegel wanted West and Cohen to direct the film, “from the beginning,” she says.
Katie Lee Biegel
Ben Fink Shapiro
“We loved RBG, and we loved the Julia Child documentary that they did as well and the way that they were able to use archives and also tell the story about food with Julia,” Katie Lee Biegel tells The Hollywood Reporter of West and Cohen.
Still, not everything went their way as they sought to bring Roston’s book to the screen, with Katie Lee Biegel in particular highlighting the fundraising challenges.
“There were several times when we thought this was not going to happen just due to the sheer finances of raising money to make a documentary,” she says. “There were several times when we just didn’t think that we were going to be able to raise the budget to do it, and that was something that I worked really hard on. And fundraising is not in my wheelhouse, so that was something new that I learned.”
The documentary traces Windows from its humble origins as part of the twin towers in the 1970s to the restaurant’s highs and lows tied to the stock market in the 1980s, recovering from the first World Trade Center bombing in the ’90s and how Lomonaco finally brought culinary acclaim and financial success to the restaurant ahead of its planned 25th anniversary celebration in 2001.
Throughout the 40-minute film, the people behind Windows tell its story. Denis Leary gives voice to the archival words of the late Baum, who also created such iconic New York restaurants as Tavern on the Green, the Rainbow Room and the Grill at the Four Seasons. Lomonaco, Ruth Reichl and wine master Kevin Zraly also share their memories of the establishment. And Peruvian hostess Nathalie Tolentino and Ivory Coast native prep cook Sekou Siby reveal how they came to work at Windows, with its many foreign-born staffers highlighting the role of immigrants in the restaurant industry.
“Windows had over 400 employees from two dozen countries, and I think it was something like 60 different languages were spoken,” Katie Lee Biegel says. “Restaurants then couldn’t function without immigrants, and restaurants now can’t function without immigrants. Anybody who likes to to go out to dinner and likes to go to a restaurant should appreciate the fact that an immigrant is making their food and and making their experience.”
At a time in which immigration has become a particularly hot-button political issue in the U.S., Katie Lee Biegel hopes that audiences can respond to the immigrant employees at Windows on the World with “empathy” and an understanding that “people are people.”
Top of the World, which Katie Lee and Ryan Biegel executive produced through their Montalto Pictures banner, is part of Katie Lee Biegel’s post-Kitchen chapter as both she and Ryan Biegel continue to focus on “storytelling through food.”
Moving on from her “dream” job co-hosting The Kitchen, Katie Lee Biegel now hosts the All on the Table podcast, has launched a series of It’s Not Complicated cooking videos on YouTube and releases her weekly Katie Lee Kitchen Substack newsletter.
“I am really interested in the way that food and media is changing, and the way that there are so many different opportunities now. It used to just be like the having the show on the Food Network was the holy grail, and that was my dream, and I got it, and I loved it, and it was an incredible experience, and I spent 12 years on that show and loved every moment of it,” she says. “But now there are so many other ways to have a platform and a voice in food media, and I really want to continue writing recipes and creating in that way.”
And she sees her YouTube and Substack ventures as a way of bringing back an older form of food content on her terms.
“It kind of seems like everything that was old is new again,” she says. “The way that, essentially, food magazines became blogs, and now we have Substack, and so Substack is like being back to a blog format and like you’re creating your own magazine. And the same with food television, like the stand-and-stir in the kitchen type shows that are no longer being made are what people want to watch on YouTube. That’s always the kind of food TV that I liked watching, like I love watching somebody in their kitchen and having a calm cooking experience and learning something and having some takeaway. And now that’s what people want on YouTube. So I love that that’s back. It’s just in a different space.”
She adds, “I just want to do what I like and what I want to do. It’s not what the network wants. I get to do the recipes I want. I get to make the content that I want.”
Top of the World, directed by Cohen and West, is produced by Ryan Biegel, Vicky Liu and Holly Siegel. Executive producers are Amy Entelis and Roxanna Sherwood for CNN Films, Ben Bitonti and Loren Hammonds for Time Studios, Katie Lee Biegel and Ryan Biegel for Montalto Pictures, Jane Rosenthal and Berry Welsh for Tribeca Studios, Kerianne Flynn for New Plot Films, Regina K Scully for Artemis Rising Foundation and Oren Jacoby of Storyville Films.
Top of The World airs at 8 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 7 on CNN and is streaming starting Tuesday, Sept. 8 on CNN.com and CNN’s app.
