A fine dining restaurant lets the customer choose the price: $15 or $125

In New York there is a new restaurant that believes that haute cuisine is a universal right and lets the customer choose if you want to pay 15, 45 or 125 dollars for a tasting menu between seven and nine dishes which includes delicacies such as cured egg yolk or lamb cassoulet.

The motto of Community Kitchen es: «Access to good food is a universal right.»

«To me, good food means food grown by farmers who care about what they do, brought by workers treated with dignity and respect, well paid, cooked wonderfully and served so that everyone can afford it,» explains Mark Bittman, the founder of this project.

They offer a tasting menu of between seven and nine dishes (EFE).

On this week’s menu there are: baked wild apple with salt; tomato tea; salad with shishitos and Spanish anchovies; bread with butter; cured egg yolk, with pea shoots and radishes; cabbage with hazelnuts and shallots; carrots with yogurt and mustard; cordero cassoulet; and plum cake.

A restaurant that is a social experiment

«You don’t have to choose what you want from the menu, we are going to bring you all the dishes little by little,» explains a waiter to a customer who came for the first time on the recommendation of a friend.

Apart from appetite, it is necessary to come without rushing, as the tasting of the «menu by times» It takes an average of an hour and a half.

The haute cuisine restaurant that lets the customer choose the price: 15 or 125 dollars (EFE).

Bittman, who wrote a column on gastronomy in the New York Times for more than a decade, he says that for now this restaurant was conceived as a three-month «pilot project» that will last until December and then the idea is to open a permanent restaurant in New York.

«I often joke that unlike most restaurants, we will lose money intentionally, while most lose money unintentionally. This is an experiment. It’s a research project. It’s a social project. At first glance it looks like a restaurant, but it’s not a normal restaurant,» Bittman explains.

The price of 15 dollars (which is what in the Big Apple it costs a simple salad) is «for whoever needs it», that of $45 covers the entire cost of the meal and that of 125 dollars (which is closer to the price of a tasting menu in the Big Apple) «helps maintain the mission» and is «a great way to contribute to the community,» according to the website Community Kitchen.

The menu includes delicacies such as cured egg yolk or lamb cassoulet (EFE).

Feasible thanks to donations

The restaurant is located in the Alphabet City neighborhood, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and a few meters from some public housing blocks.

Maya Vilaplana, director of the restaurant’s dissemination, grew up in this neighborhood and affirms that this project is feasible thanks to donations.

«They are what allow us to provide food of this quality without having to charge the high prices of most places that serve this type of food,» he explains.

The restaurant accepts reservations, but always leaves tables open so that people from the neighborhood can find a seat without problem (EFE).

The restaurant accepts reservations, but always leaves tables open so that people from the neighborhood can find a place without problem.

Mavis-Jay Sanders, the culinary director, says that since they opened in September she has seen many people in the neighborhood repeat the experience: «People come with their friends and say, ‘I have to go back to my family,’ and then they bring their family.»

Sanders knows that for many of his clients it is the first time they have tried haute cuisine and that is why he tries to use «ingredients that people recognize, but in a different way.»

«We also introduce new things. I think once people try a couple of really good, unexpected bites, they just trust you for the rest of the process,» the chef explains.

EFE Agency.

GML