Sandy-Ravaged Totonno's to Get a Helping Hand Some of the money that two restaurants raised to help Governor, which last week gave up its struggle to repair the damage done by Hurricane Sandy, will be sent to another embattled Brooklyn restaurant. Totonno's, the legendary pizzeria in Coney Island, will receive $5,000 from a benefit organized by Coi restaurant in San Francisco, and another several thousand dollars from a dinner held at Eleven Madison Park. The news, first reported on Serious Eats, is a lucky break for a New York landmark that has sorely needed one since the Atlantic Ocean swelled over the Coney Island boardwalk and flooded the neighborhood. Like many small businesses, Totonno's has had to deal with moldy walls, ruined floors, trashed equipment, unreliable contractors, unhelpful bureaucrats and skeptical lenders. But Totonno's is a special case. It is a landmark in the history of American pizza, one that is treasured by chefs including Alain Ducasse, as well as by generations of New Yorkers. I had my first pie at Totonno's back in the 1990s. I was writing an article about brick oven pizza, which was then seeing a revival at places like Lombardi's and Grimaldi's. I had tasted their handiwork, but it wasn't until I went to Coney Island that I understood what they were trying to do. It was as if all my life I'd been listening to wedding bands cover "Brown Sugar" and then I'd heard the Rolling Stones for the first time. Totonno's was the unrivalled touchstone for brick-oven pizza in New York City because it had been making pies the same way since it opened its store on Neptune Avenue in 1924. When other places began ladling sauce from a bucket, Totonno's was still cooking plum tomatoes canned in San Marzano. When they starting opening bags of shredded processed cheese, Totonno's still arranged slices of fresh mozzarella on its wheels of dough. The cheese went down first, before the sauce, to keep the crust from getting soggy. When many New Yorkers were convinced that classic New York pizza was baked in a moderately hot gas oven, Totonno's was still blistering its pies next to scorching piles of coal. When we think of the city's cultural institutions, we picture art museums and ballet companies. But Totonno's, which has a direct lineage to the origins of pizza in New York City and which preserved its traditions against creeping industrialization and some very rough years in Coney Island, is a cultural institution in its own right. It is the Carnegie Hall of pizza. Led by Antoinette Balzano, the family that owns Totonno's has been hard pressed to fund repairs and replacements so it can start making its memorably charred pies again. A laboratory has finally certified the walls free of mold, but the pizzeria needs a new floor, a dough mixer, a refrigerator and a cheese grater. While a line of credit should cover the expenses, the pizzeria is still paying off loans it needed for repairs after a fire in 2009. As Louise Ciminieri, the formidable dining room presence known to everyone as Cookie, likes to say, "We don't know how to make money. We know how to make pizza. But money has started to come their way. A restaurant in Chicago, Geja Café, donated $6,726 after an article mentioning Totonno's plight appeared in The New York Times. A few days after a report on NPR, a woman in Washington state mailed a twenty-dollar bill to Neptune Avenue. "I told her I would put her bill in a frame and write her name under it," Ms. Balzano said. There are people out there that are wonderful people in America. Today Totonno's has some new friends in the restaurant business. Will Guidara, the general manager of Eleven Madison Park, said that his restaurant would offer to return the donations of attendees at a November fundraiser for Governor, but would give them the option of redirecting their money to Totonno's instead. He hoped that the sum might total between $3,000 and $4,000. The chef Daniel Patterson decided yesterday to give Totonno's some of the money raised at a Sandy aid benefit at Coi, his San Francisco restaurant, cooked by Corey Lee, Christopher Kostow, Evan Rich and other leading California chefs. "We're all happy to help," Mr. Patterson wrote in an e-mail. That's what people do for each other, right? Totonno's is amazing. Relying on fine-dining restaurants to fill in the gaps left by the government in times of crisis is kind of a joke, but we did our best. I know that the next time San Francisco gets leveled by an earthquake our friends in New York City will do the same for us. The government may still help; Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced yesterday that some federal aid money would be distributed as grants to small businesses hurt by the storm.