Ken Concepcion and Michelle Mungcal know food. They know its power to spark memories – the aroma of a home kitchen from generations of cooking. A prized family recipe handed down through generations. Dinnertime with family. Holidays. Super Bowl Sunday.

The mammoth Eaton and Palisades fires on Jan. 7 destroyed thousands of homes, leaving many with only memories of the culinary experiences that bond families and friends for decades.

Gone too are the cookbooks — the culinary bibles that brought guidance to those experiences.

The pair – owners of the bespoke Chinatown bookshop Now Serving – is on a mission they’re calling “Friends of the Shop,” to help victims replace cookbooks they lost to the firestorm.

Their goal: To help bring back a little piece of home life that so many lost.

“For us, owning a cookbook store, food and what it means ties up a lot of memories for people,” Mungcal said. “It gives a sense of home.”

Even as the GoFundMe pages go stagnant months after the disaster, Palisades and Eaton fire victims are still grieving, said Mungcal. Months later, survivors have not had time to process what has happened.

“Your urgency is to want to help, to make somebody feel better,” Mungcal said.

At the beginning of May, the pair put out the call to fire victims for their cookbook wish lists.

And more than 400 answered.

The fire victims each filled out an intake form listing up to 10 cookbooks they’d like replaced.

Mungcal said she and Concepcion wanted to do something that was personally impactful for victims, something that meant more than an impersonal, massive fundraiser.

Now, the small business owners are faced with soliciting nearly 4,000 cookbook donations on their website at nowservingla.com. And, that’s a big lift for a small staff, said Mungcal. But they are determined to succeed, for the sake of their community.

The couple’s own journey to recovering a sense of home is what led them to take a chance on opening a specialty bookstore a little more than seven years ago.

At the time, Concepcion was head chef at Cut – Wolfgang Puck’s Michelin star Beverly Hills steakhouse.

“We had this idea for a few years before actually opening,” Mungcal, a working makeup artist said. “Ken and I wanted to have a family, but with chef’s hours, especially in the fine dining area, it was challenging.”

Concepcion didn’t go to culinary school, he said. In fact, right after graduating from Washington University in 1996, he worked at a bookstore in St. Louis.

It was at that bookstore that Concepcion fell in love with food. It was pre-internet, when Food Network was at its peak on television, he said.

“Books were my way to peer into that restaurant world,” Concepcion explained.

Two years later, in 1998, Concepcion traded books for knives and began his culinary career as a prep cook. He worked for various mom and pop restaurants before landing at the Ritz Carlton in St. Louis.

Concepcion worked for Wolfgang Puck for 12 years, before leaving behind a successful culinary career to focus on family.

“Opening Now Serving was a way to have Ken still be in the food industry and a way to talk about food, without the 14-hour days,” Mungcal said.

For his part, Concepcion said books have always been important to him, and cookbooks, in general, informed how he approaches the food world.

“I would never think that 20 something years later I would own a bookstore,” he said.

The 500-square-foot shop – at 727 N. Broadway – is tucked away in the heart of Chinatown, off Hill Street in Far East Plaza.

Every inch of table space and shelving is covered in food-related books and periodicals.

It was crucial to the couple that they offer more than just books.

“The restaurant ties in Kens’ background gave us an idea of the kind of store we wanted to be and who we would attract,” said Mungcal, who added about 15% of the store’s inventory are culinary tools.

Sprinkled into the cookbook mix are utensils, pantry items and food offerings. For example, there’s Brightland’s virgin olive oil at $37; there’s a Microplane zester for $20, Guatemalan dish towels by Minna for $30; there’s Mise chef non-skid shoes for $129.

“We wanted to make sure it didn’t feel like just a bookstore,” Mungcal said.

And, the couple’s family goal was realized. They have a child, Frankie, who is exactly six months older than Now Serving.

And, it’s been through their daughter’s eyes that Mungcal and Concepcion have experienced firsthand the confusion, the complexity of a community’s bereavement.

As Mungcal describes it, the family can “physically see and feel the impact” of the fires.

They were evacuated for a month from their home on the border of Altadena and Pasadena. Their daughter’s teacher and one of the 7-year-old’s friends lost their homes. Neighbors lost businesses.

According to Mungcal, five months after the fires people are still in crisis mode, still early in the grieving process.

“It’s not a fast fix,” she said. “A lot of people are just doing the thing right in front of them. There is no room to process it all yet.”

The cookbook drive, for Mungcal, Concepcion and the Now Serving staff of four, is giving fire victims something they have agency over.

And, the pair hopes the drive will also help boost sales at Now Serving, which – along with other small retailers – has experienced a really tough economic year.

“Consumer confidence, across the board, is way down,” Concepcion said, “the best thing you can do is try to recreate.”

The former chef at Wolfgang Puck added the wildfires came while L.A. was still feeling the aftershocks of the writers and directors guild strikes. Add to all that, he said, last year’s rising inflation as well as political uncertainty of the last several months.

It’s particularly tough for Now Serving, said Mungcal, as their bookshop sales relies on people cooking at home. Now there are literally tens of thousands of people not doing that, she added.

As the Friends of the Shop program now enters phase two – the gathering of cookbooks – Mungcal and Concepcion are urgently putting out the word as they try to fulfill nearly 4,000 requests.

Mungcal prefers more directed donations from their nowservingla.com website where they’ve annotated fire victims’ wishlists.

The gesture of purchasing a cookbook replacement for a fire victim, said Mungcal, is a tangible one.

“People can help make an impact and they know where the gift is going,” Mungcal said.

And, she added, “truthfully, it helps our small business because it’s been a really challenging year.”

But the pair is determined, purchasers or not, to complete the wishlist. They’ve held raffles of collector’s item cookbooks to raise funds to purchase wishlist items. And, Mungcal said she’s working with publishers for donations and may eventually source used cookbooks to help fill the need.

At some point, Mungcal said, they will have to close the intake form and stop taking wishlists.

But the small business owners are in no hurry. They are sensitive to their community and the overwhelming number of tasks involved in rebuilding their lives, said Mungcal.

“We don’t want to set up another deadline people have to contend with,” Concepcion said.