By Patrick Hedlund
DNAinfo News Editor
EAST VILLAGE — Big-name restaurateurs Daniel Boulud and Keith McNally better watch their backs on the Bowery.
The Lower Eastside Girls Club debuted its newest culinary venture Monday by opening a new café on the Bowery that will offer locally made organic goods while also employing members of the nonprofit youth organization.
The Celebrate Café, housed in the front of the Bowery Poetry Club at East First Street, grew out of the club’s efforts to provide job-training opportunities while simultaneously serving up healthy food options for the community’s lower-income population.
The café will also act as a trial run for the Girls Club’s future eateries and cooking programs at its forthcoming headquarters on Avenue D, which is slated to open within the next two years.
“This little dinky café will translate into something bigger as couple years down the road,” said head chef Will Pentecost, 24, who has worked with the club since his mother Lyn Pentecost founded it in 1996.
The former culinary school graduate, who interned at McNally’s popular SoHo bistro Balthazar and also worked at the Union Square greenmarket, said he passed up other jobs in the restaurant-rich neighborhood to manage his own kitchen and promote healthy eating in the community.
Among the café’s featured items is a New Orleans-inspired gumbo, Dominican-style rice and peas, handmade pizza, sandwiches, hot dogs, fair-trade coffee, brownies and other sweets — all made with locally sourced, organic ingredients.
“Most of the stuff we’re doing is simplified,” said Pentecost, adding that club members with no prior cooking experience are easily able to learn the recipes.
Celebrate Café employees earn about $8 per hour plus tips for their shifts, and more than dozen girls currently work out of the eatery and the group’s Sweet Things Bake Shop on Avenue C, where the food is prepared each day.
One of the staff, 17-year-old Fatima Haidara, works as a server on Saturdays and said, “if I didn’t have this experience, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”
In addition to earning some cash, she gets to meet a diverse cross-section of customers at the café — from fellow teens to poets performing at the space.
“It keeps us out of trouble,” said Haidara, who also mentors younger club members. “When I was those girls’ age, I didn’t talk to a lot of people. [The club] helped me build my confidence.”
For Will Pentecost, the eventual goal of the café is to promote organic eating to a Lower East Side public housing community that often relies on nearby bodegas and takeout restaurants for its meals.
In the meantime, though, the café is giving club members an opportunity to see firsthand the fruits of their labor.
“It’s just all about the girls,” Pentecost said. “You being a customer is really providing an education for another person. Here, you get a lot more than what you pay for.”
