Everybody Eats Brings Its Pay-As-You-Feel Pop-Up Restaurant to Avondale

The do-good K' Road dining initiative that has been supporting the homeless and broke students for the last couple of years has expanded to include a new a bi-weekly pop-up at Avondale's Woodworks Cafe.

For those who may not know about Everybody Eats just yet, the Kiwi social initiative is an organisation that rescues food that would have otherwise ended up in landfill and uses it to host weekly pay-as-you-feel banquets instead. "The whole idea of the paying system is that we don't know who is paying or how much they are paying – and we want to keep it like that," founder Nick Loosley told Love Food Hate Waste.

Guests at the original Monday night Gemmayze St pop-up often number in their hundreds, and around 70-80 percent of Everybody Eats' customers are usually homeless. The expansion to the Woodworks Cafe site on Wednesday and Thursday nights is a welcome one, the Everybody Eats team commenting that "it means that heaps food being saved from otherwise going to waste."

Barring eggs and dairy products (such as treats like ice cream and cream for soup), all of the ingredients used in the meals are rescued. The ingredients are sourced from food rescue charity Kiwi Harvest and local supermarkets — things like 'limp lettuce, brown bananas, day old bread and expired tins of tuna', which are then converted by a revolving set of chefs into delicious three-course dinners. In the past, chefs from Bird on a Wire, Mudbrick Winery and The Cult Project have lent a hand to create meals at the pop-up, as well as some home cooks.

With their Avondale doors now open, Everybody Eats is actively recruiting for more volunteer waiters, cooks and cleaners. Contact the team directly for more details.

Image: Everybody Eats.