So What Exactly Is This Pay-What-You-Can Dinner Thing?

Dinner at Post Haste: Scallops and Vichyssoise (left) and duck / Photography by K.C. Tinari

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On Wednesday, August 26th, restaurants around the world will be celebrating “Pay What You Can Day,” when guests order whatever they want and pay whatever they can. It’s part of a global movement to try to make restaurants more accessible and welcoming to people who may not otherwise be able to afford to dine out.

This program was initially launched by the restaurant Masala y Maiz in Mexico City, but the holiday (for lack of a better word) is now celebrated in restaurants all over the world — in Mexico and the U.S., from Madrid and Havana to Istanbul and Mumbai. Restaurants are, by their very nature, exclusionary spaces. But the industry is built around the idea of hospitality and welcoming everyone to the table. This kind of program is an attempt to square that circle; to show that chefs and owners can sometimes do more, engage more, offer more, without it killing their bottom line.

In Philly, though, there’s just one restaurant signed on to officially mark the occasion: Post Haste in Kensington.

Along with restaurants around the world celebrating the event, chef Ari Miller and the crew at Post Haste will invite everyone to “simply order what they’d like and pay what they can. No minimums. No qualifications. No questions asked.” Alcohol isn’t included, of course. You still gotta pay full price for that.

But this isn’t something that Post Haste does only once a year. Miller was introduced to the larger Pay What You Can movement during a collab dinner with chef Telly Justice from HAGS in Manhattan’s East Village. Justice has a history with food advocacy and equitable hospitality before becoming a chef (she works with food advocacy groups, and in food distribution to people in need), and got Miller involved with the grassroots global initiative. But at Post Haste, he and his team have also been doing a weekly pay-what-you-can service every Sunday from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. They launched it with a pay-what-you-can New Year’s Eve dinner which, according to Miller, “was just bonkers. People loved it.” And the program has been a fixture at Post Haste ever since.

It works like this: You show up, order, and eat. When the check arrives, every item is listed at zero dollars (again, alcohol not included). There’s an auto-gratuity added for these Sunday services to make sure the staff still gets paid. But other than that, you decide what to pay for the meal — either what you can pay or what you choose to pay.

Poste Haste

“Sundays were pretty dead,” Miller tells me. When he first took over the kitchen at Post Haste they spent a lot of time kicking around ideas for what they could do to increase exposure. They considered all kinds of unusual things (Hot Dog Sundays were one possibility), but then came that collab dinner with Justice and that’s when it all clicked.

“That exposure to it,” Miller explains, “combined with Telly’s really singular vision for how a chef can be in service to the food, absolutely, but in service to the community, too.” That was what convinced him there was something better than hot dogs he could do on Sundays. And the pay-what-you-can model felt like something that was worth trying over the long term. Plus, he knew he needed something that would get people talking about Post Haste. This, he thought, would accomplish that, too.

“It didn’t feel gimmicky,” he tells me. “It felt like part of how we present ourselves. Also, the idea of pay-what-you-can? People already understand that. They come in knowing how it works because you already do it with tipping.”

Tipping, he explained, is a consideration of value. You think about the experience, and you decide how much to add. Pay-what-you-can works the same way. “We just kind of redraw the borders around it,” Miller says. Rather than being solely an exchange for service, pay-what-you-can forces you to consider the entire meal, the entire experience, and everyone involved in it.

“This isn’t charity. This is simply trying to widen access to the craft we practice. It’s trying to un-gatekeep certain things. Handmade pastas, steak, and caviar — we have a lot of really nice, really high-end things on the menu. Four days a week, we assign them a value. One day a week we ask, can you pay this? So, one day a week, we make it a little more accessible.”

Pretzel with whitefish and caviar at Post Haste

Some people pay more than they would’ve had the bill been totaled normally — which has made the program more sustainable and a little bit easier on the bottom line. Some pay less. But there’s no judgement. No side-eye. Miller tells me that, like with tipping again, things tend to even out. “Check averages are more or less in line with the rest of the week,” he says.  And the dinners have absolutely had an impact on the restaurant’s place in the community, and their relationship with regulars.

“It’s definitely positioned us as community-minded,” Miller says. “I mean, I feel like we always were, but this allows us to express that. [These dinners are] a conversation between us and our community. And we’ve even had people who come in and ask, like, Can I just give you fifty bucks for this? They don’t even want to eat. They just want to help. But we’re like, no! Come sit and eat, man! Come have a meal.”

Scallops and Vichyssoise at Post Haste

So if you’re down for rubbing elbows with your fellow man and participating in a global conversation about value, trust, and the barriers that exist in even something so universal as sitting down to dinner, make your plans to visit Post Haste on the 26th.

Or just show up on any Sunday evening for dinner with the neighbors, think about what that kind of experience is worth to you, and pay whatever you can. Because even amid all the daily challenges of living through late-stage capitalism, these kinds of experiments prove that not everything has to be about maximizing profit. It shows that hospitality can — and should — be for everyone.