Five-Alarm Blaze Guts Midtown Restaurant

A five-alarm fire that raged through the middle of the night has destroyed a Murray Hill restaurant, leaving 27 people, including 12 firefighters, with minor injuries.

George Zbeda lives a block away in an apartment that overlooks Frontier Coffee Shop at 39th Street and 3rd Avenue. The restaurant caught on fire around 12:30 a.m. Friday. Zbeda says the towering flames that went through the roof were about eight stories high by 1 a.m.

"It kept burning and burning and it would go up to the sky and it turned to be black smoke," says Zbeda, "and then all of a sudden a huge ball of fire again and it kept going 'til the morning."

Chris Kasimis works in a restaurant directly across the street and says the fire looked extinguished by the time he got to work at 9:30 this morning.  

"It was just a lot of fire trucks, lot of chaos, streets were closed," says Kasimis. "I didn't see any fire myself, but there was still a lot of smoke, a lot of debris."

Most of the shops and restaurants on Third Avenue were in business this morning. But Murray's Bar and Grill, which is next door to Frontier Coffee Shop, was closed.

The fire department says it has still not determined the cause of the blaze.