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Community Kitchen demonstrates that good food can be grown, delivered, prepared, and served justly and equitably.

Access to good food is a universal right.

Community Kitchen is planning our next chapter.

Following our NYC pilot, we’re exploring long-term locations on the Lower East Side and elsewhere and other ways of bringing our model to life. We’re sharing what we’ve learned and advocating for public restaurants as essential to communities, designed to serve everyone.

A Different Kind of Restaurant

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A Different Kind of Restaurant *

Our food system gets it wrong.

  • 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.

  • 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. 

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • We support local, marginalized farmers who use agroecological practices, minimizing impact on the environment and maximizing flavor and seasonality. 

  • 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.

  • We prepare top-quality food from scratch that appeals to all members of our communities, using primarily local and seasonal ingredients.

  • We charge on a sliding scale to make our food affordable to everyone.

Community Kitchen is a meeting place for neighbors and friends. Together with community members, we are building a space where diversity, equity, and care 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.

  • We’re disseminating and sharing the lessons learned from our 2025 pilot, to help shape the future of the public restaurant movement.

  • We’ll work with trusted partners to open new branches of Community Kitchen, first in NYC and then around the country.

  • We partner with sister organizations and communities worldwide to grow the movement to establish public restaurants.

  • 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.

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.