For a man whose work as a sound engineer and tour manager had already taken him all over the world, Tommy Joy wasn't expecting to fall in love with Ukraine. Before his first visit around seven years ago, he couldn't even find it on a map.
But with Ukraine now gripped by war, Joy has devoted much of his life to raising funds to support his adopted country -- whether it's buying badly needed supplies or simply serving-up grilled cheese sandwiches from his kitchen. In an exceptional time, Joy is aspiring to be a peddler of normal.
"The people there are trying to live a normal life," Joy said during a brief stay back in the Bay Area. "So it brought a little bit of normalcy."
Normalcy is a somewhat contradictory word for a man who spends large swaths of life stuffed in a tour bus filled with musicians, navigating the road with acts like guitarist Kenny Wayne Shepherd. Even in his time-off, Joy, a native of Fresno in California's Central Valley, felt the call to travel. When he first visited Ukraine he fell in love with its architecture and spirit. Not long after, he fell in love with a Ukrainian woman and tied the knot.
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When the pandemic clamped down on life, he started-up what he called Tommy's Secret Kitchen in his Kyiv apartment and sold American-style sandwiches in the bar downstairs. Grilled-cheese and meatball subs were his piéce de résistance. Back then, cooking was about his survival trying to eke out a subsistence living in lean times.
"I could be walking down the street and people will walk up to me," he said, "'hey, you’re that American sandwich guy, aren’t you?'"
Joy was back in the states when Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, unleashing its bullets and missiles on the country's buildings, infrastructure and people. Joy's wife was behind in Kharkiv.
"When the bombs started to drop she was calling me," Joy said, "and I could tell she was basically running out of the building to safety."
In that moment, the tour manager in Joy kicked-in and activated skills he'd long employed getting musicians from planes to hotels to stages. He arranged for transportation to get his wife, her son and her mother safely out of the country. Joy himself hopped on a plane and landed in Poland where he encountered thousands of fleeing Ukrainian refugees at the border. He began working with transportation teams in Poland to help deliver refugees to their new temporary homes.
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When he returned to Kyiv, he saw a city badly bruised from repeated missile attacks. Over the unfolding months as he ducked in and out of the country to return to various music tours, he began crowd-funding to buy supplies like tourniquets for front line soldiers, generators for businesses and food for the hungry. It became his mission.
Upon returning to Kyiv he reopened his Secret Kitchen, re-branding it the "war time edition." Now the kitchen was focused on the survival of others, as Joy used his crowdfunding to supply free meals to locals in need. Comfort food took on a new meaning.
"I know he can cook a hell of a sandwich," said Joy's friend Chef Zhemy Mykhailenko, a chef in Kyiv who feeds thousands of Ukrainian soldiers daily. "If he's doing something for the community I'm sure he does a great job at it."
From his temporary Bay Area residence in Lafayette, Joy pulled up short video on his laptop showing an regular Kyiv street engulfed in the plaintive wail of air raid sirens. Another clip panned the skyline as the sound of an explosion roared somewhere in the city, a horrific part of routine life in Ukraine these days.
Joy pulled up another clip that he said embodied the spirit of the country; It showed a deep crater in a road left by a missile attack. The shot dissolved into another view of the same spot a week later, where a road crew had already filled in the massive hole and traffic was back in flow.
"That’s Ukraine," Joy said with the pride of an adopted son.
Joy harbors no illusions he's making a large dent in a worldwide conflict. But in a way, he's paying his respects to a country that has embraced him in its folds, through good times and bad. His kitchen operates on the premise that a slice of cheese grilled on a slice of bread can maybe bring a little slice of humanity.
"This makes me feel like I have more of a purpose," Joy said rolling out his suitcase for the next trek, "and that purpose isn’t just to have a good time I guess."
