Mark Bittman Is Opening a Sliding-Scale Restaurant on the Lower East Side | Eater NY

"Framed as a sliding-scale social experiment, this Lower East Side restaurant opens September 19 inside the Lower Eastside Girls Club, led by executive director and food-justice advocate Rae Gomes with chef Mavis-Jay Sanders, the 2022 James Beard Award-winning chef of Philly’s Drive Change (with experience at Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Untitled). Multi-course dinners run $15 for neighborhood folks, $45 for those paying closer to cost, and up to $125 for those contributing more—no questions asked, no policing—with half the seats reserved for local residents at the $15 tier; reservations go live September 17 for the neighborhood and two nights later for the public, and dinner is served Wednesdays through Saturdays. The space repurposes an unused bakery—honeycomb-tile floors, an old-fashioned display case, and a counter replaced by a bar—with a full kitchen tucked inside the nonprofit, and an entrance mosaic of the neighborhood made from shards of prior Girls Club locations; inside aims for a high-end dining room “minus the attitude,” with custom-built tables, Jono Pandolfi ceramics, and Michelin-level service without pretension. The menu is a single, seasonal, several-course offering (mostly plated with a few family-style dishes), with a potential vegan alternative. Launching as a pilot through late November, the team is testing the menu and the model while building relationships with neighbors; the mission centers on prioritizing BIPOC farmers using agroecological principles, treating workers well, and universal accessibility—including a plan, per the Times, to create 80 jobs and pay each worker over $32 an hour—backed by an advisory board that includes Alice Waters, José Andrés, Marion Nestle, Saru Jayaraman, and Karen Washington; ideally, Bittman says, half of diners will pay $15 and the rest will split between the middle and higher tiers." - Melissa McCart