Community Kitchen’s restaurant model demonstrates that good food can be grown, delivered, prepared, and served justly and equitably.
Access to good food is a universal right.
Community Kitchen restaurant will open mid-September at NYC’s Lower Eastside Girls Club.
We’re welcoming diners to Community Kitchen’s pilot, which will serve dinner Wednesday through Saturday beginning mid-September, in our wonderful space at the home of the Lower Eastside Girls Club at 7th Street and Avenue D in Manhattan’s East Village. The pilot will feature menus created by James Beard award-winning chef Mavis-Jay Sanders, a champion of locally sourced, plant-forward cuisine, and will operate using an innovative sliding scale pricing model, which will encourage our neighbors and friends to enjoy spectacular food at affordable prices.
A Different Kind of Restaurant
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A Different Kind of Restaurant *
📍 Where
Lower Eastside Girls Club
281 East 7th Street
New York NY 10009
(East 7th Street at Avenue D)
[MAP]
⌚️ When
Wednesday - Saturday
Seatings at 6PM and 8PM
mid-September - November 30, 2025
🧾 Menu & Sliding Scale
More info to come.
🗓️ Reservations
Coming soon! Meanwhile, follow us on Instagram or check back here.
Our food system gets it wrong.
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Food production generates 24% of US greenhouse gas emissions. Routine overuse of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and antibiotics drives pollution, decreased biodiversity, nitrogen runoff, and widespread health problems. The brunt of this damage is borne by BIPOC and marginalized populations in the US and around the world.
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Nearly 70% of restaurant workers in the United States — mostly women, immigrants, BIPOC and marginalized populations — earn less than $15 per hour. Harassment, unpaid overtime, and unpredictable schedules predominate.
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Diet-related and preventable chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer cause 678,000 deaths each year in the United States alone. These diseases disproportionately affect BIPOC and marginalized communities.
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For the majority of Americans, nutritious food is difficult to find and afford. 19 million Americans, most of them from BIPOC and marginalized populations, live in areas with limited access to affordable, nutritious food. More than 60% of all calories are in ultraprocessed foods.
But we can reimagine it.
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We support local, marginalized farmers who use agroecological practices, minimizing impact on the environment and maximizing flavor and seasonality.
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We pay workers a dignified living wage, with full benefits and a reliable schedule. We prioritize hiring from our communities and investing in our workers for their future success.
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We prepare top-quality food from scratch that appeals to all members of our communities, using primarily local and seasonal ingredients.
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We are creating an innovative sliding scale to make our food affordable to everyone. We’ll make that sliding scale scheme open source to help advance the growing public restaurant sector.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
— Buckminster Fuller
Community Kitchen will be a meeting place, an event space, a neighborhood gathering space. Together with community members, we will build and offer a space where diversity, equity, and dignity are norms, not exceptions.
Long term goals.
Community Kitchen’s impact on workers, farmers, climate, and food security is amplified by a multi-pronged approach to supporting the Public Restaurant movement.
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We’ll provide financial and operational support to organizations and communities replicating our model around the country and the world.
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Community Kitchen will have a profound impact on its community, team, farmers, and the environment. In our first three years of restaurant operation, we will:
Serve 335,462 meals for guests living on a limited income
Save $8.5M for guests living on a limited income
Invest $7.1M in local good food farmers and vendors
Create 80 living-wage jobs averaging $32/hr
Mitigate 30%+ of GHG emissions vs fast food meal
Support 50+ local, BIPOC-led & regenerative farms
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We’ll work with trusted partners to open new branches of Community Kitchen, first in NYC and then around the country.
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We’ll assert universal access to good food as a human right, and advocate for local and national policy that funds the establishment of Public Restaurants nationally.
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We’ll work with sister organizations worldwide to grow the burgeoning movement to establish public restaurants.
Let’s talk!
Interested in joining the Community Kitchen team, partnering with us, or supporting our ongoing work? Submit this form to get in touch.
We’re part of the growing Public Restaurant movement.
Community Kitchen is collaborating with world-class partners to maximize our impact, centering justice and equity in all we do.
