‘I want to be disruptive’: Mark Bittman sees profit-less restaurants as a win

The former New York Times recipe columnist is pitching investors the chain of his wildest dreams, with no specific menu: Community Kitchen, or non-profit restaurants

At 73, with close-cropped silver hair and a propensity to toss off a nebbishy shrug, Mark Bittman isn't ready to settle into retirement. After more than a decade of writing a wildly popular New York Times recipe column, The Minimalist, as well as more than a dozen cookbooks, countless opinion pieces that tapped into his despair over our broken food system and his passion for food policy, and most recently, the 2021 book Animal, Vegetable, Junk, a sweeping account of the history of food, he finds himself yearning for something more.

You write the same thing over again and nothing changes," Bittman said. I kind of thought, you know, I'm not as enthusiastic about this kind of journalism as I was. I'd like to do something more concrete."