OPEN TABLE

Mark Bittman's experiment in pay-what-you-can fine dining.

- BY HANNAH GOLDFIELD

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