Two or three months ago, chef and owner Clark Barlowe started serving a pay-what-you-can dish at his restaurant Heirloom. Barlowe opened Heirloom five years ago in the Coulwood neighborhood, serving a tasting menu made nearly exclusively with North Carolina ingredients. Diners could order up to 12 courses, and the menu was constantly changing. Only 10 minutes from the city, Barlowe hoped to be a destination for diners. He found that wasn’t the case.

“Charlotte just doesn’t really work that way,” he says. “In the early days, I thought of it as, ‘This is just Charlotte,’ rather than ‘This is Coulwood, this is northwest Charlotte.'”

Heirloom has since evolved to be more approachable to the neighborhood, shifting from a place that only serves high-end tasting menus to one that serves both a tasting menu and a la carte options. The addition of the pay-what-you-can dish is meant to bring in even more diners who can’t afford the experience of a fine dining restaurant otherwise.

The idea came from Barlowe’s fiancée Gracelyn. The lowest-priced menu items before the pay-what-you-can option were an $18 lamb burger and $20 fried chicken entrée.

“She said, ‘It just makes the restaurant seem unapproachable to people,'” Barlowe recalls. “We think it’s a low-cost entrée because we see all the costs that go into it, but put yourself in other people’s shoes.”

On the menu, the pay-what-you-can dish is called “family meal,” and changes daily. Guests are charged $1 for it, but can write whatever price they feel comfortable paying on their bill. Most recently, the dish has been a chicken stir fry using Carolina Gold Rice, Creekside Farm chicken, and whichever vegetables are on hand in the kitchen. Other plates have included fried mushrooms with gravy, mashed potatoes, and braised greens and braised beef with broccoli and garlic smashed potatoes. The ingredients still meet Heirloom’s standards of being locally and responsibly sourced.

“It’s usually whatever we have on hand that we would be using for our family meal at the restaurant,” Barlowe says.

Some guests will come in and pay the $1, while other customers will pay $25 or even $100 without ordering the dish simply to support the idea behind it. Barlowe says they don’t have issues with people taking advantage of the dish, and it helps the kitchen use items that may not have much more shelf life.

Barlowe hopes to recruit more chefs to add a pay-what-you-can dish to their menus, giving Charlotte something special to be known for. We’ll be following his progress, and hope to see more restaurants follow suit. —Kristen Wile

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