Hannah Goldfield writes:

One morning in late September, the writer and former Times columnist Mark Bittman walked into the Lower East Side Girls Club, a rec center in Alphabet City and the site of what would become, in less than eight hours, his first restaurant. At 6 P.M., an inaugural group of guests would arrive for the soft opening of Community Kitchen, a not-for-profit fine-dining experiment that Bittman spent years concocting, and which had found a home—for the next few months, at least—in an underused café on the club’s ground floor. The multicourse tasting menu, cooked by a highly credentialled chef, would be elegant and refined, made with heirloom produce from local farms. Experienced servers might pour meticulously curated natural wines, ask the obligatory “Have you dined with us before?,” and swiftly fold the rumpled napkin of anyone who got up to use the rest room. What would set Community Kitchen apart from the dozens of restaurants like it across Manhattan and Brooklyn was the way patrons would pay: by purchasing tickets on a sliding scale—fifteen, forty-five, or a hundred and twenty-five dollars, based solely on what they felt they could afford—for an experience that would be identical regardless of tier.

Bittman, who turned seventy-five this year, is tall, bald, and bespectacled, with a face that is often contorted into the expression of someone who doesn’t suffer fools; if he ran for office, “Nutrition is health care, stupid” might be his campaign motto. For many years, he was best known for his recipes: his iconic, enormous cookbook “How to Cook Everything” has been reprinted three times since 1998, and his weekly Times column, “The Minimalist,” instructed in pointedly unfussy home cooking (no-knead bread, chicken stir-fried in ketchup) for more than a decade. Around 2008, Bittman began to pivot from gourmand to polemicist, interrogating the systems, politics, and policies that shape the way we eat. When he talks about Community Kitchen, he uses gnomic declarative phrases that call to mind Michael Pollan’s mantra: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” “Junk food is tasty, and it’s relatively cheap,” Bittman told me. “Cooking is hard. Eating in good restaurants is too expensive for most people. Access to good food should be a universal right.”

Just before noon, the café was in relative shambles. Tables and chairs, still being upholstered in printed textiles, were belly-up in the middle of the dining room. The kitchen was empty, save for an enormous stockpot of broth, with chicken feet bobbing at the surface. Bittman seemed unconcerned. He had been careful in selecting the people in charge, including Rae Gomes, the executive director, and Mavis-Jay Sanders, the chef, both Black women in their late thirties who have worked in the food-justice movement, and he was determined to stay out of their way.

Sanders, who wears her hair in a modified Mohawk and speaks in a fast, muttered clip, told me that she had been skeptical when Bittman first approached her. “I was just, like, cool, another white man doing this thing just so he can feel good,” she said. But Bittman was persistent, and, over the course of months, won her over. Sanders, who has cooked at multiple Michelin-starred restaurants, was invigorated by the idea that a restaurant could be both luxurious and equitable. She wanted Community Kitchen to have the trappings of the urbane, upscale places where she’d been trained—Gabriel-Glas stemware; All-Clad pots in the kitchen; carefully choreographed, warm, unobtrusive service. She also wanted to leave behind some of the industry’s less humane tendencies. “I feel like a lot of those places are about power, people positioning their power over other people,” Sanders said. “This room is about people, in service to other people.” [Continue reading…]