When the dining room of a popular gourmet restaurant in Manhattan was gutted by fire, the refrigerators were packed with expensive food that needed a new home — fast!   The solution: a donation of truffle butter, fiddleheads and other goodies to a nearby soup kitchen.

Same goes for leftover crusty French baguettes, asparagus spears whose tips have been used by a finicky chef and pans of fresh tuna steaks trimmed to the wrong size and rejected by the intended restaurant.

These tasty donations — a regular occurrence at Broadway Community’s Inc.’s soup kitchen, on Broadway at West 114th Street in Harlem — are a stark contrast to the institutional-sized No. 10 cans of food heated up and ladled out at many facilities serving the underprivileged.

The stories I hear from my wife of 23 years, Maureen Fitzpatrick, sous chef at the gourmet BCI soup kitchen, never cease to amaze me.  After preparing today’s lip-smacking lunch of lamb tagine, Maureen raced to her cookbooks for details on blinis and creme fraiche. Why? Because Wednesday’s meal promised to be even more incredible, thanks to the donation of an $1,100 tin of Petrossian caviar by someone who wants to remain anonymous.

Chef Michael Ennes and volunteers like Maureen and chefs John and Bob are able to add back a bit of dignity for the 200 or so souls who are served restaurant-style — no paper plates –  in the basement of Broadway Presbyterian Church.

Thanks to a generous connoisseur of caviar, the kitchen’s last meal of 2009 will be world-class fare in a world that has been less than fair.