Gourmega: a supper club to Rethink Food

Gourmega, a supper club in Soho, New York. Photo: Seth Caplan.

Oscar Peña visits Gourmega and gets to talk to Mariam Issoufou as well as chef Lester Walker about what people can expect once the supper club opens this month.

There is a sign next to a narrow loading dock in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village: “How we Rethink Food.” Three diagrams explain what happens behind this roll up gate: excess ingredients from local restaurants get donated here, which a large kitchen turns into 30,000 meals each week for distribution to community organizations. Much like architects balancing wealthy clients with prestige projects, there have been several recent attempts in the culinary world to bridge art and social purpose. These efforts involve leveraging chefs’ cachet to make the wealthy care about their food-insecure neighbors, using haute cuisine to subsidize subsistence. In this vein, Gourmega is a high-end restaurant developed in a space run by Rethink Food and commissioned by the New York culinary collective Ghetto Gastro.

Read the rest of the review.