Le Bertin: a sustainable vegan restaurant

Hello! I'm Joey Ross. I've been working in food for about a decade, and have worked in fine dining specifically for most of that same decade.  I'm coming here to ask you to support my dream for creating a new standard for restaurants in general, and fine dining restaurants in particular. Le Bertin is a project that has been operating as a pop up in my spare time, but it's time it becomes it's own thing and fully evolves into what it was meant to be from the beginning: A restaurant built on sustainable sourcing and ethical business practices.
                                        (Smoked eggplant terrine with pickled grapes)

Le Bertin is a project inspired principally by a love for food itself. We want to create the most beautiful, delicious, progressive and forward thinking food we can, using only plants and plant based ingredients. We want to celebrate little known and hard to find plants, as well as preparing ingredients people may be familiar with, but in unconventional and new ways. We want people to think of plants and cooking with them in new ways. We want to build relationships with our farmers here in Pennsylvania who are often overlooked for the big producers and distributors, but who often actually have better products. The food at Le Bertin is heavily grounded in classic French cuisine, but using modern techniques to transform vegetables in appropriate ways
(Daikon radish cooked in dashi, with fermented tomato butter and corn pudding)

We intend for Le Bertin to be an experience a bit different from most fine dining restaurants, in that, for us, nothing is more important than sharing this vision with the public as much as possible. Whereas many restaurants on this level general charge as much as $250-$350 for a tasting menu, we will never charge more than $45 for our four course tasting menu, or $85 for our eight-course tasting menu. We want to try to make this level of cuisine more accessible to people who have never been able to afford to try it. We don't want to celebrate exclusivity or have a place where the draw is that you can't afford to be there. We want to strip the experience of fine dining of unnecessary and off putting things like dress codes, impersonal and robotic service, stuffy environments and astronomic prices.
(Banana creme brulee with tonka bean meringue and banana ice cream)

Our commitment to sustainability means making sure everything we use in the restaurant is sustainably sourced. It's well known at this point that animal agriculture and fishery do not have long term sustainability and harm the environment every year, but we are also focused on the effects of importing plant-based ingredients from places where their production harms the local environments there. Sustainable sourcing is often a buzzword that doesn't practically mean anything, but we are committed to low carbon footprint sourcing, sourcing from farmers who grow in environmentally healthy ways, close to here in Philadelphia, many of them long time friends and associates. We want to showcase the whole of what we source, avoiding food waste. Most of our dishes are themselves no-waste, using every part and trimming of the vegetables we buy in some way.
(Impossible meatloaf with honeynut squash, pickled cabbage, sauce perigueux)

We are also committed to ethical business practices. Le Bertin will be structured as  Co-op. The common worker-owner relationship in fine dining restaurants easily leads to the type of exploitation that is common in restaurants, long hours, unpaid work, poverty wages, and lack of decision making power. All employees will share in the profits of Le Bertin, which they themselves create, and be able to make real decisions about their work hours, pay, the food they make, and work environment. The vertical owner-chef-employee model is one we are avoiding. Avoiding toxicity in restaurant culture isn't enough, the model of pay and who makes the decisions themselves need to change.
          (Roasted heart of palm, caramelized cauliflower, and bouillabaisse) 
As part of our employee owned model, we want all employees to have the best we can give them: health insurance, paid sick and personal days, flexible scheduling with no fear that they can't or should'nt call out of work when they don't want to be there. A work-life balance that is focused more on life outside the restaurant, than a life devoted to working. We want to make the very best food, served with the very best service, in a no-stress environment.

We are looking for $50,000, to secure a lease on a space here in Philadelphia, purchase equipment and furniture, and to serve as working capital for our first few months. We have a business plan with financial projections for the first 5 years, with all of our monthly expenses and their percentages of our expected revenue laid out, and we will gladly share them for transparency's sake. Thank you for your support! It would mean the world for this to finally become a thing.  Please check us out on Instagram @ Bertinphilly, or check out my personal instagram @joeyxross

Kind regards,

Joey Ross