By lunchtime, the café had convincingly transformed into a restaurant: tealights flickered next to arrangements of wildflowers on carefully set tables. The food came out slowly as the kitchen came to life on the first evening, but the service was smooth and consistent. If Sanders's first two courses, one called “corn” and the other “tomato,” could be accused of being too fancy and fancy (they included sips of warm tomato water and corn silk tea, respectively), they were also exceptionally tasty, and each subsequent course, vibrant and precise, raised the bar. The hearty yet decadent casserole included a piece of lamb rib, lamb sausage and velvety baked beans. The broth I had seen bubbling that morning was poured onto the table into a bowl of fonio, a delicate West African grain, and topped with wedges of roasted radish and turnips and a bright orange cured egg yolk.
A few days after the soft opening, I joined Sanders as she shopped at the Union Square Greenmarket. I pointed to a bushel of habanada peppers, a hybrid championed by her old boss Dan Barber, a master farmer at Blue Hill in Stone Barns who works with plant breeders to develop very specific fruits and vegetables. The peppers are identical to habaneros, but without the powerful heat. “It’s strange to culture a pepper!” Sanders exclaimed. “How many times have you had a Scottish bonnet and you’re just like this,” her voice became cartoonishly whiny, “I don’t LII this one!” she said, laughing. But she clearly admired Barber's iconoclastic impulse. “I moved to New York to understand how this man's mind works, and it's fucking cool,” she told me. “Anybody who's just like, 'You know what? What I want doesn't exist, I'm going to go out and create it.'
In the United States, pay-what-you-can restaurants are, perhaps unsurprisingly, few in number. In an era where it is extremely difficult for restaurants to turn a profit, many restaurateurs, especially in the fine dining industry, are looking for creative ways to make a profit. more money from their patrons and serve the highest paid of them. One of the few businesses that has found success with a sliding fee scale system is Everytable, a Southern California-based chain that sells prepared takeout food that charges different prices at different locations based on the median income level in the store's zip code—a structure made possible by the fact that everything is prepared in a centralized kitchen outside the store.
Over dinner at witchesa tiny three-year-old restaurant in the East Village with tasting menus starting at one hundred and thirty-five dollars per person; Sunday brunch is pay-what-you-can, starting from scratch. Sunday brunch has become the busiest place in the restaurant with many regulars, one of whom likes to pay with origami. Couple owning witchesCamilla Lindsley and Telly Justice worked in high-end restaurants for years before they decided to “change” the archetype by developing a more inclusive model. “Any restaurant can calculate how much it would cost to offer free food or on a sliding scale on any day they are a loss leader,” Justice said. “Cook one meal on the sliding scale for an hour a day. Just do something.” Although the idea seemed radical, Lindsley and Justice eventually learned to treat it as business as usual. “We originally came in with a lot of literature and a lot of education, and almost immediately we discovered that it sucked,” Justice continued. “Nobody wants to find out about this. They just want to take advantage of it.”
Bittman, who operates with a budget of more than $1 million from private donors including Bloomberg's philanthropic arm, is determined to stay away from the commercial game, although he recognizes the nonprofit's limits. He hopes to one day partner with the city: he purposefully chose the location of the Community Kitchen because of its proximity to several NYCHA buildings and often refer to Restaurantes Populares, government-subsidized restaurants that opened in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in the 1990s and sold dishes made with local ingredients for less than one dollar. “We’re waiting to talk to Mamdani,” Bittman told me a few days before the community kitchen opened. A few weeks after opening he told me that attracting now for the restaurant's residents, this proved to be a difficult task. The team hired a community organizer to help them get them involved.
Fine dining as a genre is based on exclusivity and scarcity, on the feeling that money functions as a personal code. What would it be without these subtexts? Two days after my first meal at Community Kitchen, I returned to the first location open to paying guests. The crowd was racially diverse, eclectically dressed, and leaning toward middle age; it was decidedly devoid of the clean-cut young white men who usually fill the city's tasting-menu restaurants. Taking a seat at the end of the bar, I found myself looking around at the other patrons, wondering who had paid what, although I knew with guilt that this was defeating the purpose. The lone visitor, who appeared to be in his seventies, looked so scruffy that I wondered if he was an inhabitant of an old rent-controlled loft in Alphabet City. But as he left, we struck up a conversation that quickly turned to screenings he attended at the Telluride Film Festival this year. As it turns out, he was a retired investment banker turned gentleman farmer living in Connecticut, and natural wines seemed to go to his head. The manager came in and, with his usual grace, offered to let me finish my meal in peace.
To my left at the bar stood a couple who looked to be in their forties—a woman with a dark haircut and heavy eyeliner and a man in a sports jacket—who appeared to be on a first date marked by awkward silence. Halfway through the meal I looked back and realized they had disappeared between courses. Bartender Cab Washington, who is also a stand-up comedian, told me that before they left, he ran into a man outside the bathroom. The man said that the date was unsuccessful and that if Washington was interested, he should ask the woman out. Even without the pressure of the bottom line, Community Kitchen showcased characters and intrigue. It was like any other night in New York. ♦
