A noted public-policy expert and star chef might seem like an unlikely pair. But Drexel’s Mariana Chilton and restaurateur Marc Vetri, who began teaching culinary courses at Drexel earlier this year, are using their unique synergy to encourage people to connect, to ease anxieties about not having enough to eat and to rectify the poor quality of food available to people on a low budget.
The idea was relatively simple: open a pay-what-you-can restaurant in Drexel’s West Philadelphia neighborhood, where more than 48 percent of residents live in poverty. But when School of Public Health Associate Professor Mariana Chilton initially conceived the plan, there was this one smallish problem.
“I’m a researcher. I know about poverty and policy,” she says, “but I don’t know about running a café.”
And yet opening a café is exactly what this determined and busy professor set her sights on doing. Among other roles, Chilton is co-principal investigator of Children’s HealthWatch, a national network that researches the impact of public assistance programs on the health of young children and their caregivers; founder of Witnesses to Hunger, an advocacy project featuring the testaments and photographs of women raising children who have experienced poverty and hunger; and an advocate before Congress on the importance of child nutrition programs.
Not surprisingly, given these efforts, the café Chilton and her partners envision will be a nonprofit storefront where “anyone can come regardless of their ability to pay,” Chilton explains.
The restaurant, planned for a site along Lancaster Avenue in the Powelton Village section of West Philadelphia sometime next year, will work this way: Any member of the community can patronize the café, which will serve fresh, healthy, quality food. At the end of the meal, diners pay whatever they can afford. Some will be able to pay little, or even nothing.
“Others will come not only because the food is good and the atmosphere is nice, but because they love the mission,” so they’ll pay full price or even overpay, says Chilton. “The idea is to create a space where people who are low-income and people who are professionals and have some modicum of wealth can share the same food and a similar experience.”
In other words, the café will play multiple roles besides providing nourishment. It will combat poverty, encourage encounters, enhance community pride and potentially offer culinary skills training.
Still, at its heart, the endeavor revolves around preparing and serving food to the public, and Chilton’s résumé by no stretch includes “restaurateur.” She is, however, a major authority on food insecurity, which landed her an appearance in “A Place at the Table,” a 2012 documentary about hunger in America.
It just so happened that one of Philadelphia’s premier chefs, who similarly has turned his consternation over children’s lack of food into an innovative initiative, watched the film with great interest, and decided to contact Chilton.
“My staff came running in and said, ‘Marc Vetri wrote you!'” Chilton’s response, she admits with a laugh, was, “Who’s that?”
Vetri, who is sitting next to Chilton as she relates this anecdote, smiles. After the native Philadelphian and 1990 LeBow alumnus debuted his self-named high-end rustic Italian restaurant in 1998, the accolades poured in: the highest ranking from Philadelphia Inquirer food critic Craig LeBan, a designation as one of Food & Wine magazine’s Ten Best New Chefs, and a James Beard Award for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic. Vetri and his business partner, Jeff Benjamin, have since opened several other swoon-worthy eateries in Philadelphia, including Osteria, Amis and Alla Spina.
It’s something of an understatement to say Vetri knows how to run a restaurant. But he also fiercely cares about making a difference — enough that he’s been willing to wrestle with the bureaucracy behind public-school lunches and the extensive fine print regarding things such as cost and portion size. In 2008 he and Benjamin created the Vetri Foundation for Children, whose flagship public-school lunch program, Eatiquette, does away with the dreary cafeteria line, replacing it with healthy, from-scratch meals served family-style to schoolchildren sitting around communal tables.
“We’re dealing with the school system, school lunches, trying to create the relationship between healthy eating and healthy living,” Vetri says. So after seeing a Philly-based anti-hunger expert featured in a documentary that struck home, he figured he’d reach out. “So I just emailed: ‘Hey, I have a foundation, I have some restaurants in the area,'” Vetri says modestly. And during the ensuing conversation, Chilton “mentioned she had this thought”: a pay-what-you-can café.
“We know how to open up a restaurant,” was Vetri’s response. “We can certainly help you with that.”
In practice, that means the Vetri Family Foundation will train the staff, consult on the café’s layout, help design the menu and offer fundraising support. Vetri has also committed to acting as a fiscal safety net. If any funding gaps occur over the café’s first five years, Vetri will cover the expenses up to $350,000.
“The idea is to create a space where people who are low-income and people who are professionals and have some modicum of wealth can share the same food and a similar experience.”
— Mariana Chilton, associate professor in the School of Public Health
To turn the café into a reality, Chilton has been collaborating with various local partners. With its interest in anti-hunger efforts in the Philadelphia area, the Leo and Peggy Pierce Family Foundation provided the initial grant for the project. (Chilton doesn’t hesitate to stress that, despite the generosity of the Pierce and Vetri foundations, the café still needs additional funding to support its five-year operating plan.)
The innovative urban-farming center Greensgrow Farms in Kensington serves as the conduit to the neighborhood, creating partnerships with the local business association, community development groups and the area’s councilwoman, as well as helping to conduct focus groups with residents. The Drexel community has been involved as well. Undergrads at Westphal College of Media Arts & Design created initial renderings of possible exteriors and interiors and provided ideas for logo designs. The Center for Hospitality and Sport Management — where Vetri teaches a class — will hire the café’s manager, oversee the staff and potentially provide job training for community members.
The pay-what-you-can community café concept began in Brazil, Chilton explains, during that country’s “zero hunger” campaign. In this country, the One World Everybody Eats Foundation supports the development of community cafés, which now number more than 40 nationwide, including the SAME Café (So All May Eat) in Denver, opened by Brad and Libby Birky in 2006. About 450 to 500 people come through the SAME Café’s doors each week, with the average payment being $4 per person.
A dining option such as this can have a profound effect. In an email, the SAME Café’s Libby Birky offers an anecdote about a woman who had been coming regularly over a few years. “Sometimes every day of the week, quietly wiping tables and sweeping the floor to pay for her meal or dropping the change she had in her pocket into the donation box.”
The woman was well dressed and had a home, but had been unemployed for a long time. One day, the woman lingered until the lunch crowd died down, then approached the counter.
“She leaned in shyly and asked in a very quiet voice, ‘Can I give you a hug?'” Birky relates. “As I came around the counter to hug her, I noticed she had tears in her eyes.” The woman had landed a job, and that day was the first time she was able to pay for her lunch. “She was so grateful for SAME Café.”
The chance to create these connections between people energizes Chilton’s and Vetri’s work. “Both of us feel strongly about the social experience of food itself,” says Chilton. “One of the biggest factors connected to hunger and food insecurity is being socially isolated and not feeling like you belong.”
Vetri continues on that theme by describing an encounter he had when he joined in on one of his foundation’s Eatiquette school lunches. He sat down at one of the tables with the kids, “and there was this one boy, maybe 9 years old, and he was not happy and was not eating anything.”
Vetri started talking to the boy and encouraged him to try some of the food. The chef put a small portion on the boy’s plate. “He ate a little, then a little more. After about 15 minutes he was laughing and really had a nice lunch. If he’d just lined up” — here Vetri gestures like he’s holding a tray, bored — “he would have sat there alone and he wouldn’t have eaten anything and then he would have left. He would have been forgotten.”
With its mission of alleviating hunger in a dignified setting, the community café project represents an overlapping of passions for the accomplished chef and the data-driven researcher.
As Vetri puts it, “You don’t have to worry about ‘How much is this?’ That’s a huge thing.”