Back in May, Mexico City restaurant Masala y Maíz declared that Wednesday, August 26 would be a Global Day of Hospitality. It announced an initiative, “Eat What You Want / Pay What You Can,” and invited restaurants around the world to allow guests to pay whatever they wanted for the regular menu for the day. “At a time when rising costs and inequality make dining out increasingly inaccessible, participating restaurants dedicate one day of service to a model that prioritizes access, generosity, and shared responsibility,” it wrote.
I wrote about the rise of the pay-what-you-can model for one of Ravenous’ first stories, a profile of chef Telly Justice of HAGS in New York, who was crossing the country, doing pop-ups with other chefs, and showing them how to create pay-what-you-can menus. Justice spoke about how she built HAGS to be able to offer that service model on an ongoing basis, and that no, it doesn’t mean the restaurant is constantly losing money. Just the same, I can’t think of another New York restaurant that regularly offers pay-what-you-can food. So, this past Wednesday, I was excited for the opportunity to dine out and, potentially, not pay as much.
Unfortunately, my day was kind of a bust. My first stop was Vato, a North Mexican burrito counter in Brooklyn that regularly draws lines. But when I arrived, I found that I had misread its hours, and it had closed ten minutes prior. So I walked a half hour across Brooklyn to Little Egg, which was listed as one of the official participating restaurants, only to find out it had dropped out and the official list of participants hadn’t been updated. Organizing restaurants across countries is, I imagine, incredibly complicated, and things fall through the cracks. Still, I happily paid full price for a cold brew and a blueberry lime hand pie with minty vanilla cream.
Elsewhere, though, the day seemed to have been a great success. Mina Park of LA’s Baroo was excited to participate. “We booked up right after we made the announcement [that] we were participating, which we think shows that our community was excited for this event," she says. In recent years, Baroo has transitioned from a more casual restaurant serving grain bowls to serving $140 tasting menus, and while it attempts to participate in fundraisers and to donate to local causes, offering a pay-what-you-can menu is a more direct way of giving back to the community.
Kelly Jacques and Samantha Weiss, co-owners of Ayu Bakehouse in New Orleans, first heard about the pay-what-you-can model through Justice and HAGS, and say they were excited to apply the model to the bakery. “Our offerings are still a luxury for many, so there was a clear opportunity to lower the barrier to entry even further and welcome a wider audience into the shop,” they write in an email to Ravenous. The two say there were a lot of customers who had been wanting to try Ayu’s offerings, and that this was the thing to finally get them in the door. And that even if ticket prices were lower, customers showed love with good tips.
Justice says the day brought her renewed hope for the model. “To be frank, after a year of growing interest in PWYC models I’ve recently started to see enthusiasm wane,” she tells Ravenous. Also on Wednesday, for instance, Minneapolis’ Modern Times cafe announced that after six months of rebranding as “Post Modern Times” and serving free food every day, which was done as the restaurant became a de facto community hub while ICE’s presence terrorized the neighborhood, it would be bringing prices back to the menu. Owner Dylan Alverson wrote on Instagram that while the initiative was successful, “The overwhelming need often hid the reward. This came close to breaking me and Modern Times.”
Still, the Global Day of Hospitality may have sparked something. On Wednesday, Justice says HAGS had far more walk-in guests than usual and was forced to start a waitlist. She hopes that the curiosity from the global initiative settles into something more permanent. “Ultimately the goal is to envision a food environment where on any given day, there are multiple outlets where people who need or want it can get excellent, accessible food. That will take diners showing up and supporting concepts that do this work, and restaurants having faith that good work will be supported.”
Ideally, participating restaurants would be inspired to offer an occasional pay-what-you-can menu, and not wait a year to do so. Aram Zeit, one of the co-owners of Jack’s Pizza in Torrance, California, says the day brought a lot of business to a typically slow Wednesday, and that four of the 20 dine-in customers wound up paying more than the bill price and said they’d support programming like that more often. He said he plans to offer more pay-what-you-can days in the future. “Even though times have been rough for the past couple of years, we will never stop helping people in need,” says Zeit. Jacques and Weiss also say Ayu Bakehouse is definitely considering offering another pay-what-you-can day.
Pulling this off requires some math. “We frankly need to pay our small group of investors back first before we feel comfortable doing this more often,” says Park. She also says she and her husband, Chef Kwang Uh, personally topped up their servers’ tips so they didn’t lose out that day. But as restaurants like HAGS, Post Haste, Same Cafe, and more have proven, it’s not impossible. “It felt incredible, especially knowing so many people around the world were pitching in and participating,” says Justice. “We need more of this type of energy and action!”
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🐦⬛ Bird Droppings
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- An arbitrator ordered journalist Karen Attiah to be rehired by the Washington Post, after she was fired for quoting Charlie Kirk's racist statements. Unions matter!
