Community Kitchen launches as a nonprofit pilot in Manhattan to model an equitable restaurant: sustainably grown ingredients, well-paid staff, and plant-forward cooking accessible to all. The pilot opens September 10 inside the Lower Eastside Girls Club with communal tables and fixed-menu meals offered on a sliding scale: $15, $45, and $125. Advance online payment will replace awkward, public pay-what-you-can negotiations. The founder emphasizes that many people lack time or resources to cook and need affordable, healthy options outside the home. Many pay-what-you-can restaurants have struggled financially, highlighting sustainability challenges for the model.
Launching as a pilot in September, the project-called Community Kitchen -is designed to show what it looks like when a restaurant does everything right: healthy, sustainably grown ingredients from local farmers; well-paid workers; excellent, plant-forward cooking; and food accessible to everyone, not just those who can afford $100 dinners. Mark Bittman, the longtime food writer, started the restaurant as a nonprofit after stepping away from a career that spanned dozens of cookbooks, long-running New York Times columns, and books critiquing the food system.
Bittman had often written about the benefits of cooking at home for health, cost, and sustainability. But he realized it wasn't realistic to expect everyone to cook, and that those who don't have the time often struggle to find healthy food. "If people want to and have the time and resources to cook, the information's out there," he says. "I think the real hole is in helping people find good food affordably outside of the home."
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