‘There is healing’: NC restaurant owner reflects on how 9/11 changed her world
Twenty years ago, Inez Ribustello woke up to the sounds of her mother crying.
On television, one of the Twin Towers was on fire. Ribustello, a Tarboro native who was back in North Carolina to be the maid-of-honor in her sister’s wedding, worked in the tower next door, high up in Windows on the World, one of the country’s most famous restaurants.
“I was thinking what a mess it would be to clean up when I went back to work,” Ribustello said.
Then a plane hit the second tower. Everything in the word seemed to change at once.
“I was very confused and not really grasping what was happening,” Ribustello said. “Then, later, watching the building imploding, it was just almost like a death.”
For the last two decades, Ribustello and her husband, Stephen, have owned the Tarboro restaurant On the Square, as well as Tarboro Brewing, located about 70 miles east of Raleigh.
On Saturday, on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Ribustello will release her first book, “Life After Windows,” a memoir about losing so many friends and colleagues on that day in 2001 and how she built a life afterwards.
“I’ve been writing the book for 20 years,” Ribustello said. “It’s taken a long time to get the nerve to publish it. While I know the story’s not done for us, I feel good about this particular chapter.”
Straight to culinary school
Ribustello’s journey to fine dining and the world of wine began as a journalism student at UNC-Chapel Hill. She took a summer internship in Washington, DC, cooking meals for cousins in exchange for free room and board. She taught herself to cook with a copy of “The Joy of Cooking” and fell in love with grocery shopping and everything it meant to make a meal.
“I loved cooking more than I loved my internship,” Ribustello said.
Her father asked her to stay at Carolina until she graduated, but once she did, she went straight to culinary school in New York. There, the path shifted from food to wine, as Ribustello fell in love with the magic trapped in bottles.
Eventually she landed an entry level job at Windows on the World, which was renowned for its view as well as its wine program.
“If you could stay at Windows, it was the best education ever,” Ribustello said. “Once you got there, the pay wasn’t as competitive, so people didn’t stay as long. But if you did, you had access to everything.”
The elevator ride to the 107th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower took 63 seconds, Inez Ribustello said. In her early 20s, she would take that ride, practically a spaceship, launching her to a floor at the top of fine dining. The doors opened to carpeting featuring maps of the world’s major cities, as if tiptoeing across a globe.
“It was magnificent,” Ribustello said. “To see above the clouds, to see the planes taking off and landing. It was an incredibly special place. You couldn’t help but be in a good mood.”
Had she not been in North Carolina that week in September, Ribustello would have been at work, arriving most days by 8 a.m. as the restaurant’s beverage director.
In the Sept. 11, attacks, 73 Windows on the World employees died, according to a story in Eater, an online food publication.
In the days after the attacks, Ribustello said she was anxious to get back to New York, eventually getting there a week later for a reunion with other Windows employees. She said she felt herself going through the five stages of grief and struggling to comprehend the enormity of the loss.
“I was very angry at God,” Ribustello said. “Up until 9/11, I hadn’t been an angry person in general, I had a great life with very little pain. That day was such a loss. I prayed all the time, but after 9/11 I stopped speaking to God. I stopped praying; I had a loss of faith in anything higher.”
Writing the next chapter
Like a fairy tale, Ribustello’s book begins “Once upon a time.” And like fairy tales sometimes do, she focuses on immense tragedy and the process of moving on.
“There is healing,” Ribustello said. “It’s coming, we don’t always see it when it comes, but it will continue to come. Life is painful, yet life is beautiful, if we can just endure the time that comes after.”
For Ribustello, healing came in pieces. She initially tried to stay in New York after the attacks, but her parents encouraged her and Stephen, then her fiance, to return to North Carolina. In 2002, they took over On the Square, an existing diner, and turned it into an upscale restaurant and later, a wine shop.
She said they felt the community’s embrace.
“This community has held me since the beginning,” Ribustello said. “We’ve really doubled down on the local community (over the years). We need to make sure our locals are happiest. That comes from getting people in the door and being in service in your local community. ... We’d be nothing if we didn’t have our local support.”
Ribustello has kept journals all her life, she said, and she continued in the days after 9/11. Knowing everything had changed from that moment, Ribustello marked her journals with a new heading, “Life After Windows.” It became the title of her book, which she dedicated to Sonia Ortiz, an elevator operator at the World Trade Center.
“It’s been super therapeutic,” Ribustello said. “But it’s also scary, thinking what kind of reaction it’s going to bring out in people. The fear is I’m not saying it the way people will read it, that things will get misconstrued.”
Finishing the book was met with pride, Ribustello said, but also anxiety, vulnerability and excitement.
The book is self-published and will be released Saturday, Sept. 11, at her stepmother’s shop, Rusty’s, in Tarboro. On this 20th anniversary of the attacks, Ribustello said the healing continues.
“I’ll always have a hole in my heart on that day,” Ribustello said. “There was a loss of innocence, of lives, of carefree-ness. I do feel like my healing continues to come. There’s no end to healing. I pray I’ll be able to heal until the day I die.”
This story was originally published September 9, 2021 at 2:54 PM.
