Massimo Bottura Launches Month-to-month Dinners to Feed Hungry New Yorkers

Twice per week on a tree-lined road in Harlem, a workforce of cooks prepares regionally sourced, three-course dinners for 300 folks an evening. Tables are set with recent flowers and menus are printed for every meal. Waiters in darkish aprons ship plates, typically accompanied by reside jazz, poetry, or spoken phrase. Neighbors collect at communal tables, consuming and chatting, sharing tales, breaking bread.

The restaurant in query could also be one you’ve by no means heard of: That’s as a result of it’s not fairly a restaurant. Refettorio Harlem is a neighborhood kitchen from a nonprofit from Michelin-starred chef and UN Surroundings Programme Goodwill Ambassador Massimo Bottura and his accomplice Lara Gilmore: Meals for Soul. Refettorio Harlem, the primary in the USA, opened in 2020, and is a part of a worldwide community Bottura based in 2015. It now options over a dozen Refettorios throughout 9 international locations.

The no-cost eating places are constructed to deal with urgent local weather and vitamin points: meals waste and meals insecurity. Every Refettorio recovers meals and affords neighbors in want no-cost elegantly served three-course meals with music, artwork, dignity, and hospitality. The Refettorios incorporate different providers that profit the wants of the neighborhood. In Harlem, that features culinary coaching, life expertise, rebuilding livelihood for these previously incarcerated, and the humanities. The group additionally does neighborhood outreach: In Harlem they’re partnering to assist feed Kids’s Help Providers on 118th Avenue and the Veterans Residence down the block.

This previous Monday evening, at its house on the Emanuel AME Church on West 119th Avenue, a gaggle of six Harlem-based cooks — JJ Johnson (Fieldtrip, Bankside), Russell Jackson (Reverence), Celeste and Khouri Beatty (Harlem Brew Soul), Asia Shabazz (Contento), Nino and Bilena Settepani (Settepani) and Aliyyah Baylor (Make My Cake) — gathered to cook dinner a five-course dinner impressed by the Langston Hughes assortment of poems, Montage of a Dream Deferred. The soiree was held to rejoice the launch of Refettorio’s latest initiative: The Harlem Chef’s Lab.

Andrea Sturdy

Launching in February 2025, the Harlem Chef’s Lab goals to provide a month-to-month collection of collaborative ticketed dinners for the general public mixing artwork, music, and meals to learn the Refettorio’s twin missions of decreasing meals waste and serving meals with dignity for free of charge. The listing of roughly twenty cooks concerned contains Una Pizza’s Anthony Mangieri, Johnson, Cortney Burns previously of Bar Tartine, Nadav Greenberg of Shmoné, Jackson, Vijay Kumar of Semma, Alessio Rosetti of La Devozione, and Mattia Agazzi of Gucci Osteria Los Angeles, amongst others.

The Chef’s Lab was created to assist the Refettorio’s work: The hope is to develop the listing of 20 cooks to 52 to allow them to invite a chef to cook dinner each week of the 12 months. The concept for Chef’s Lab grew from the collaborative spirit amongst native cooks and Refettorios: Bottura has been inviting chef buddies to return, create, and share since its inception in 2015, and in Harlem, visitor cooks have been popping in each few weeks to cook dinner for the neighborhood.

On the soiree on Monday evening, cooks served bread miso maitake mushroom tartlets, escabeche of branzino with roasted plantains, braised oxtails with coconut rice grits, and beer mac and cheese to a gaggle of almost 100 folks together with native artists, musicians, and authors, buddies from the neighborhood, sponsors, elected officers, and members of the town’s meals coverage workforce.

“The work of having the ability to be certain that the entire meals that’s coming into our metropolis is getting on the plates of New Yorkers is so essential,” mentioned Ora Kemp, senior coverage advisor with the Mayor’s Workplace of Meals Coverage, who attended launch occasion on Monday. “The Refettorio ensures our neighbors are getting the meals and the social helps they want.”

The objective of the Harlem Chef’s Lab goes past fundraising. “We hope the Harlem Chef’s Lab dinners encourage folks to rethink the unimaginable worth our meals system affords earlier than losing, whereas preserving the dignity, hospitality, and sweetness all folks deserve, irrespective of their lived expertise,” mentioned Jill Conklin, Meals for Soul’s govt director.

Conklin hopes the Chef’s Lab will create a means for the broader public to expertise the enjoyment of a Refettorio meal. “If you find yourself attempting to speak the significance of cultivating social inclusivity, there isn’t any higher means than to ask folks in to expertise it,” mentioned Conklin.

Harlem Refettorio

Since 2020, The Harlem Refettorio’s Meals Rescue Program has saved greater than 60,688 kilos of meals. They’ve served 60,500 meals to neighbors in want, and their pantry program has delivered greater than 5,000 kilos of recent meals to the local people. In 2024, they’re on tempo to eclipse the meals restoration numbers in each weight and worth.

“The ideology round eating with dignity is one thing that resonates with us,” mentioned Russell Jackson, chef of Reverence in Harlem, a 98 p.c zero-waste restaurant.

The meals do extra than simply feed people; they deal with social isolation too. “We’ve all the time seemed for a means during which we will deliver instant worth to somebody’s journey by way of life,” mentioned Free Meals Harlem founder and Refettorio Harlem director Bob Wilms. “Meals is a connector. We don’t simply supply a free meal however create neighborhood across the desk. The result’s a spot during which everybody concerned advantages, volunteers, employees, and purchasers, feeling an immense sense of belonging and function. Everybody comes away with extra.”

Refettorio Harlem on the Emanuel AME Church, 39 W. 119th Avenue, New York, NY 10026; Observe alongside on Instagram for the date of the primary Harlem Chef Lab dinner.