Jon Bon Jovi Opens His "Pay-What-You-Can" Restaurant

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Jon Bon Jovi Isn't Money Hungry

Talk about celebrities leaving their boxes today. MC Hammer is branching into web search engines and now, Jon Bon Jovi is opening a soup kitchen. Well, it's not really a "soup kitchen" per se, but more of a “pay-what-you-can” restaurant.

The Jon Bon Jovi Soul Kitchen opened on Wednesday in Red Bank, New Jersey, near the singer's hometown of Sayreville. Indeed, this is hardly a soup kitchen. As reported by The Guardian, the bistro's opening menu includes rainbow beet salad, pork chops with fig and apple chutney, and homemade carrot cake with lemon cream cheese frosting. Everything is "organic, healthy, good-for-you food".

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Providing gourmet-quality meals to the hungry, the restaurant's paying customers are encouraged to leave whatever they want in envelopes on each table, while also enabling them to volunteer on community projects in return for completely free grub (minus any stigma).

The restaurant is the latest undertaking by the New Jersey rocker’s Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation, which has built 260 homes for low-income residents in recent years. “With the economic downturn, one of the things I noticed was that disposable income was one of the first things that went,” Bon Jovi said before the restaurant’s grand opening ceremony."

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“Dining out, the family going out to a restaurant, mom not having to cook, dad not having to clean up — a lot of memories were made around restaurant tables. When I learned that one in six people in this country goes to bed hungry, I thought this was the next phase of the Foundation’s work,” he said.

These kind of restaurants aren't really that new of an idea, but the ones that already exist haven't gained much popularity. With Bon Jovi's name behind the venture, they may finally gain some ground on the budget-friendly likes of MaccyD's. We're living on a prayer.

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