The Rise of Restaurants Where YOU Set the Price

Have you ever been so hungry that you’d eat a shoe, but only had loose change to spend? If you have, then you’ve a (very) faint idea of the plight of the poorest among us; which is why it is heart-warming to hear of Bon Jovi’s restaurant. With the skyrocketing wealth inequality, it’s always good to hear that at least one of the super-rich (with a cool $300m to his name) gives a damn.

The Soul Kitchen lets you pay whatever you feel a meal is worth, and if you’d rather have a free lunch you could always pay with your time by volunteering for a community project or in the kitchen. First opened on October 19^th, 2011, the restaurant’s menu never lists a price, and customers who choose to pay simply leave the money in an enclosed envelope on the table. And the food is actually pretty good, described as “gourmet-quality”.

The restaurant is the latest undertaking by the New Jersey rocker’s Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation, which has built 260 homes for low-income residents in recent years.

“With the economic downturn, one of the things I noticed was that disposable income was one of the first things that went,” Bon Jovi told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday before the restaurant’s grand opening ceremony. “Dining out, the family going out to a restaurant, mom not having to cook, dad not having to clean up — a lot of memories were made around restaurant tables.

“When I learned that one in six people in this country goes to bed hungry, I thought this was the next phase of the Foundation’s work,” he said.

Bon Jovi, who lives in nearby Middletown, is certain about one fact:

“This is not a soup kitchen,” he emphasizes. “You can come here with the dignity of linens and silver, and you’re served a healthy, nutritious meal. This is not burgers and fries.

“There’s no prices on our menu, so if you want to come and you want to make a difference, leave a $20 in the envelope on the table. If you can’t afford to eat, you can bus tables, you can wait tables, you can work in the kitchen as a dishwasher or sous chef,” he said. “If you say to me, ‘I’m not a people person,’ I say, ‘That’s not a problem. We’ll take you back to Lunch Break to volunteer with those people. If you don’t want to volunteer with that, we’ll take you to the FoodBank.”

“If you come in and say, ‘I’m hungry,’ we’ll feed you,” Bon Jovi said. “But we’re going to need you to do something. It’s very important to what we’re trying to achieve.”

“This is not an entitlement thing,” Bon Jovi said. “This is about empowering people because you have to earn that gift certificate.”

It seems that Bon Jovi walks the walk too, “Last Friday, I was at the White House, serving on the Council for Community Solutions, got on a train, changed in the bathroom and got here in time to wash dishes Friday night,” he said. “I’m the dishwasher, for real. I can’t cook a lick.”

It should be noted that Soul Kitchen is by no means a revolutionary concept; far be it, there exists several other restaurants that have encompassed this “pay-what-you-can” mentality…. In fact, the concept is at least a hundred years old.

One World Café, or One World Everybody Eats (OWEE), is a non-profit community kitchen and foundation, originally based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Its motto is “a hand up, not a hand out.” The cafe serves an organic, natural, and local cuisine that includes vegan, vegetarian and meat dishes. There is no standard menu, the fare changes daily based on the availability of local food (often donations from patrons) and the Chef’s inspiration. It was founded by Denise Cerreta in 2003, and served as an inspiration for many subsequent American pay-what-you-can restaurants before it closed.

Notably, her landlord also lets Cerreta determine her own rent: $1,650 a month for a two-story brownstone, where she lives upstairs. One of her assistants, “Farmer John” Norborg, is a 53-year-old self-employed gardener who tends a spice garden in back of the cafe in exchange for meals. One World Everybody Eats pays all its employees a living wage, although staff wages in the restaurant industry are traditionally paid below minimum wage and survive on tips.

In 2008, the founders of One World Spokane opened using the OWEE model. In 2009, A Better World Cafe in Highland Park, New Jersey opened using the OWEE model. In 2010, the OWEE Foundation began hosting a yearly summit in January for entrepreneurs with restaurants based on One World’s model as well as those interested in starting one. In Nov 2011 One World Spokane closed, and in 2012, the original Salt Lake City location closed.

SAME, or So All May Eat, Café in Denver only asks patrons to pay what they wish. It had opened on October 20, 2006 when Brad and Libby Birky invested $30,000 to open the restaurant. The owners state that they were inspired by One World Café, and many of their practices are indeed similar to OWEE. Although it does not serve “gourmet” food like Soul Kitchen, it does use all-organic ingredients.

Grace Café also takes inspiration from OWEE, and is the first of its kind in Kentucky. Its slogan is “home cooking with a delicious mission”. It is a more recent candidate and opened in September 2014.

Historically, the very first documented case (or at least one of the first) of a pay-what-you-want restaurant was Unity Inn, in 1906. Opened by Charles Filmore and Myrtle Filmore, founders of the Unity Church, It was Kansas City’s first vegetarian restaurant. The Unity Inn provided free hot meals in return for free-will offerings.  Unity Inn’s pay-what-you-want idea didn’t gain much traction and the restaurant eventually gravitated towards set prices. Pay-what-you-want differs from pay-what-you-can only in that it emphasizes that customers get to pay anything at all, as opposed to what they can afford, and customers can even get away with paying nothing at all if they desire.

We’ll see if today’s pay-what-you-can restaurants can last the test of time. It seems probable that they may eventually disappear once again, as they had a hundred years ago, when all the good publicity dies down.

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