The Current - Mark Bittman's $15 fine dining experiment

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

For the past three months, Mark Bittman has been running a curious experiment: a fine dining restaurant where patrons pay as little as $15 for a meal. The former New York Times food writer wanted to see whether it was possible to run a restaurant where the food was healthy and locally sourced, the staff was treated and paid well and the prices were affordable. His solution: philanthropic donors, and prices on a sliding scale. As Community Kitchen prepares for its final dinner service on Saturday, Bittman tells Matt Galloway about what the project has taught him about what it would take to change the food system.

Hey Canada. It's me, Gavin Crawford, host of Because News. Each week, I put comedians on the spot with a pop quiz about the headlines. This week, we're talking about the monster of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith's own making, Wayne Gretzky's incredible pronunciation skills, and the one kind of Christmas toy experts are all calling dangerous. Miguel Revis, Emma Hunter, and Gene Yune are here, so laugh along as we try to make sense of the headlines. Follow Because News on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts for free. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. For decades, Mark Bittman has helped change how we eat. As a writer for the New York Times, he persuaded people to skip the takeout and cook real food at home. His bestseller, How to Cook Everything, has become a classic. Recently, though, Mark Bittman has been working on a different way to get people to eat better. It is a pilot project.

It's called Community Kitchen. The idea was to create a restaurant where the food was healthy, and locally sourced, the staff was treated and paid well, and the prices were affordable. Is such a thing possible? Well, let's find out. Mark Bittman is on the line from New York City. Mark, good morning. Good morning, Matt. Thank you for having me. Thanks for being here, as always. You're the guy who got us cooking at home. Why have you shifted to restaurants? The fact is that most people eat most of their meals outside of the home, or they bring their meals in and don't cook them. So much as I would love to get it,

everybody cooking. You have to meet people where they are and where they are is eating out for the most part. So tell me what community kitchen is. What was the goal? What did you want to make? You know, after writing about food and writing about good food, I wanted to do something that demonstrated what good food is. So yes, sourced well from local farmers who were doing things right. Workers paid well and we are paying much better than the industry average. Terrific food, which is not that hard to do if you have a great chef, and we do. And then sliding scale, which is the real challenge. So we have a fixed menu, and we are charging people $15, $45, and $125 for that same menu based on their income, which, by the way, we don't ask. People just do what they

want to do. It's an honor system. How did you make the math work? I mean, the joke about the way to make a small fortune in the restaurant business is that you start with a big fortune. Yeah. How did you make the math work? They say that about many industries, actually. The math doesn't work. I mean, the intention was to lose money,

and so we're successful at losing money. And the math is working because we have philanthropic backing, because this idea has appealed to enough people so that we've raised, let's say, around a million dollars, in order to do this project and to show that if you take profit out of the equation, you can provide good food to people regardless of their income. And that's the ultimate goal. The intention is to lose money.

Well, the primary intention is to demonstrate that good food can be made available to everybody. One outcome of that is definitely losing money. But, you know, we lose money on education, we lose money on transportation, we lose money on defense. There are dozens of things that our governments lose money on, and food ought to be one of them, and the thing we ought to be doing is providing good food for everybody. And you're not asking people, people can choose along that path what they want to pay. You're not asking people why they're paying $15 or why they're paying $125. We are not, and this was the most difficult part of figuring this whole thing out.

I had literally hundreds of conversations about sliding scale with people from all over the place. And we just wound up thinking, look, people are not going to, I mean, some people might lie about their income, but most people aren't. And I just don't think people are going to come in and say, I can only afford $15 when they can, in fact, afford more. And that's been our assumption from the get-go. And in fact, you know, you would think that we would be. overrun with people wanting to pay $15, but in fact, we're not. We have about a third of our customers at this point pay $15, a third pay $45, and a third pay $125, and that was our goal to have a mix of people from the neighborhood, people from out of the neighborhood, people with lots of

money, people with not lots of money, people of all backgrounds, incomes, races, geographical location, etc. And it took us a while to achieve that at the beginning. We were skewed heavily toward people who'd heard about us on media, people who were friends of mine or knew about me. But we have worked hard

at it and we now have that balance of a third, a third, a third that we were looking for. Was it tricky to convince people on that lower end of the income scale that this was a place that they would be welcoming? Because one of the things about restaurants, even modest restaurant, but certainly an upscale restaurant, is that

there are a lot of people who don't feel comfortable they don't feel it's for them. I don't know the tricky is the right word. I think we went about it the wrong way at the beginning and I do think yes we looked like and were at the beginning a restaurant filled with well-heeled

white people, not to put too fine a point on it. I mean that wasn't exactly true but I'm sure that if you were walking by that's kind of what it looked like a groovy restaurant in the neighborhood. But we hired a community community relations person, and we reached out to people in the community. We're located in

the Lower East Side Girls Club, so our main partner has a very, very solid roots in the community. And we started reaching out to their members, reaching out to their colleagues, their allies. There's a very large public housing project, or public housing campus, really, a few projects across the street from us. And we just started reaching out to people and bringing them in. And in a period of, I'd say, two weeks, three weeks, the character of the restaurant really changed. So if you went in tonight, it would feel like a different place than if you went in in September. A big part of this is that the food needs to be, it needs to be terrific food, as you said. Tell me about the chef that you hired.

We hired a woman named Mavis J. Sanders, who was already well known in the New York Food Justice Movement, but who also has worked in, well, Stoneborns is the most famous place. Hill at Stone Barns and a couple of other well-known restaurants in the city, but she does a lot of non-profit work. I had breakfast with her three years ago and said, I'm going to start this nonprofit restaurant. I want you to be the chef. And she said, yeah, sure, whatever. And we stayed in touch. And when we had the money to do the pilot, I said, okay, Mavis J, here it is. Do you want to be the chef? And she did. And she has taken over and produced by any standards, a really, really interesting and really good, intriguing menu, creative with mostly local ingredients,

almost entirely seasonal ingredients, very, very plant forward, and really appealing if you listen to our customers. What's your favorite thing to eat there? She's changed the menu a few times, but I would say my favorite thing was a Caesar salad that she was making with a Shoshito pepper dressing that was just, the flavors were just mind-blowing. They were so good. She's done a sort of cured egg yolk with broth that's been really beautiful and vegetables. There's been a roasted cabbage dish with hazelnut butter that people go berserk over. There have been a lot of very successful dishes on this menu. What did you learn?

I mean, there's inspiration drawn from your work broadly, but what did you learn from what was going on, for example, in Brazil? In the 90s, Lula, who is now president of Brazil for the second time, was part of forming what was really a farm to table, farm to farm stand, farm to school, farm to restaurant, heavily subsidized by the state movement in part of Brazil. And among those programs was a thing called popular restaurants where anyone can go, in fact, is not sliding scale. It's just anyone can go and get a great meal for less than a dollar.

The state is subsidizing the farmers who are growing the food for that restaurant and subsidizing the meals that are served in that restaurant. And it's been going on with more and less intensity for 30 years. I mean, what you've done is not state funded. As you said, it's based in philanthropy. How did you convince people who had the coin to give you that this was something worth creating here. Let me just say first that there are other people around the world and we are having monthly meetings with people who are doing whether we call them popular restaurants or

public restaurants or non-profit restaurants. We are talking to people from Scotland, Holland, Istanbul, Mexico City, Brazil, of course, and a couple of other places with more people joining almost every month. And in most other countries, these things are funded by the state. And the thrust is people deserve good food. It doesn't matter where you are on the income spectrum, that people deserve good food. Yeah, it's in the U.N. charter. And there are countries, Mexico, among them, that say nutritious food is a right of everyone. We don't have such a policy in the United States. You don't have it either in Canada. But it's certainly a sensible policy. If you think education is a right for everybody, defense is a right for everybody.

Housing. Right. Housing health care. I mean, these things are obviously debated. But how you leave nutritious food out of that debate is beyond me. But in many countries, food is a part of that conversation. I mean, one of the things we're hoping Community Kitchen does is bring to the attention of politicians that with adequate funding, this can be done. Good food, not just calories, but high-quality food can be made available to everybody.

So they were philanthropists who are interested in this program, and we've convinced a dozen or so to back us, and we have, you know, I'd say an average of one or two more significant donors joining us every month, as well as many, many small donors. This is a pilot project. What are the things that you've learned as this project has continued about? How difficult it might be to not just even scale up, but to continue? Look, it would be difficult to do a thousand of these. But we got funding to do the pilot.

The idea was to make a lot of mistakes. We've made a lot of mistakes, but we've done a lot right. And I don't think such a thing as a non-profit restaurant with a sliding scale can ever be profitable. But I think we can approach sustainability, and we've learned how we might do that in our version 2.0. and I think we can serve many, many more people than we're serving on a daily basis in 2.0, and those are two of our primary goals. The final service for the pilot project is happening on Saturday night. What do you think that's going to be like?

I am going. I think it'll be a little raucous. I think that not everybody understands that we're a pilot and people expect us to continue. We are not having any formal acknowledgement that we're closing, but I know the staff, is going to be quite raucous, and I'm going intending to have a great time. It'll be emotional. I mean, doing something is really a big step, right? We had a benefit for the girls' club the other night,

a fundraiser for the girls' club, our partners and hosts, and I said, I've cried more in this space than I've cried at any space except for my childhood home, any space in my life. Every time I go in, it's an emotional experience, and a good one. It's really been great. I love the idea of this, and I'm always glad to talk to you about how we can make the food system better. Mark, thank you very much for this. I totally appreciate that you're interested in this man, and it's always great to talk with you.

Thank you. Mark Bittman's books include How to Cook Everything, An Animal, Vegetable, Junk, his non-profit restaurant, community kitchen in New York City's Lower East Side. This has been the current podcast. You can hear our show Monday to Friday on CBC Radio 1 at 8.30am at all time zones. or you can also listen online at cbc.ca.ca slash the current or on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.