“I was looking not only to cook but also tell a sustainable story and work on something with a bigger meaning.”

Thick, sweet, and a touch pickly, the tea had been fermented by Brooklyn’s United Ferments from rhododendron foraged in Canada. Accompanied by soft, warm milk bread and a salad of lotus root, chrysanthemum greens, and togarashi, it was served in the restaurant’s garden, where we were led upon arrival. After that, every table was asked to rise, and we went en masse into the dining room to be seated as a group, at a circular counter facing the chef. Made up of 8,000 individual pieces of wood, the room was so well-constructed and serene, I realized that I could talk to the person at the other end of that bar without raising my voice.

Chef Rafal Maslankiewicz quietly introduced himself to us and then began to cook. A baked Okinawa sweet potato glazed in a Banyuls reduction, flavored with black garlic, and paired with a very Eastern European touch of braised cabbage; uni garnished with purple shiso flowers and husk cherries, served on a toasted slice of house made brioche with a quail egg inside, referenced his childhood egg-in-the-hole; a puddle of sour cream topped with raspberries and knedle, a traditional Polish dessert, here made with mochi. He explained as he served us, the ways his Polish upbringing informed his approach to the hyper-seasonal Japanese tasting menu that is called kaiseki.

Choreographed yet comforting, this was an evening at Ikigai, a restaurant that opened in Brooklyn in July with a mission. It is the brainchild of entrepreneur Dan Soha, who made his money in Bay Area and Nevada businesses — fashion wear socks, auto insurance, marketing — before moving to New York two years ago, where he bought a condominium building with a commercial space on the ground floor for Ikigai. All of it was part of Soha’s master plan, to open a restaurant where 100 percent of the profits go to feed the hungry.

“I always had a dream of opening a Japanese restaurant as a not-for-profit,” says Soha. In the San Francisco neighborhood where he grew up, his parents were known for feeding their friends and neighbors. Soha thinks that ethos rubbed off on him. But he hadn’t anticipated the second part of his mission. “I spent a lot of time trying to figure out a good partner for the profits. Originally, I was going to get food to food banks, then I started thinking about opening a food bank myself.”

That endeavor proved to be “extraordinarily complex,” even for an entrepreneur like Soha. Then someone introduced him to Rescuing Leftover Cuisine, which collects unused food from restaurants, caterers, stadium vendors, and other businesses and redistributes it to homeless shelters, food pantries, and food banks. The United States wastes about 40 percent of the food it produces, much of it at restaurants, while more than 10 percent of the population — 38.3 million people — are food insecure. Solving two problems at once, Rescuing Leftover Cuisines “does something amazing and better than anything I could accomplish,” says Soha. “So rather than financing the operations of a food bank, we give our profits to them.”

Robert Lee, co-founder and CEO of Rescuing Leftover Cuisine, is incredulous, in turn, at Soha’s generosity. Individual donations, special events, sponsorships — “There are a lot of ways for people to support our work,” he says, “but Ikigai is straight up giving their entire profit. It’s just incredible.”

Soha is able to pull it off because the restaurant has a low overhead. He doesn’t pay rent. There are no lenders and no investors but himself. “That changes the economy entirely,” he says. He’s able to provide health and dental insurance for his staff and give any money he would have taken for himself entirely to Rescuing Leftover Cuisine — all while charging $165 for 10 to 12 courses, one of the most reasonable prices for an upscale tasting menu in New York. 

It helps that staff is also focused on the mission. A veteran of several Michelin-starred restaurants, Maslankiewicz worked at Noma and 11 Madison Park before learning sushi under Masayoshi Takayama at Masa. “When I came to New York, it was 2014. All these restaurants were doing great food, but with this crazy consistency that everyone tried to achieve to get a Michelin star, there was a lot of food waste. But Masa wouldn’t let me waste any scraps. It was all repurposed. That was a great lesson.” It had been three weeks since opening when I dined at Ikigai. Everyone in the restaurant is cross-trained, so they can support each other in maximizing efficiency. Maslankiewicz hadn’t wasted a thing. 

Ikigai is the right project for him. “I was looking not only to cook but also tell a sustainable story and work on something with a bigger meaning.”

So it is, too, for beverage director Jirka Jireh. The sommelier and winemaker calls it “kismet” that she’s working here. “A lot of my background is on vineyards with winemakers and seeing food insecurity right next to them. I lived in a food desert in Oakland, and then I would drive up to Napa, and I would see rows of vines and open space that could have been planted with food and sent an hour’s drive south. When Dan started going on about rescuing food, I said I have to be on this project.”

The hyper-locavorism and seasonality of the kaiseki meshes with Jireh’s interest in East Coast drinks producers. A wine like Teacher’s Pet from Virginia’s Common Wealth Crush, which is aged on the lees for 18 months making it a white with the depth to pair with Maslankiewicz’s Waygu course, “shows the best” of regional winemaking and “blows guests’ minds.” And because it does not have to travel as far, it’s necessarily more sustainable.

As a matter of course, Jireh is also rescuing food waste to make some of the drinks she serves at Ikigai. Take her non-alcoholic pairing for the horse mackerel dish, a clarified tomato-water milk punch infused with the N/A spirit Seedlip Garden and finished with shiso oil. “I’m looking at what’s in season, what’s all over the farmers market, and asking the farmers for seconds at the market to get more ingredients.” Now that it’s fall, she plans to upcycle any kitchen waste into infused syrups for cocktails.

In the meantime, Rescuing Leftover Cuisine’s army of volunteers will be visiting restaurants, stadiums, airline warehouses, and other facilities to rescue food and bring it to over 1,000 organizations nationwide where the hungry are fed, with support from Ikigai — a fact that makes dining there all the more satisfying to the restaurants’ guests. Says Lee, who dined at Ikigai with his team, “It’s such a wonderful experience. More restaurants should do this.”