M. Frances, a nonprofit restaurant slated for DC from celebrity chef Edward Lee’s LEE Initiative, has had to rethink its plans after facing a “critical funding gap.” A big part of the initial plan was to have a female-led mentorship program, but Lee says relocating chefs from around the country ultimately became cost-prohibitive. Instead, the restaurant, which is slated to open in Union Market in October, is rebranding as Shia—an upscale Korean restaurant that will be helmed at least initially by Lee, who is also behind Southern steakhouse Succotash Prime in Penn Quarter. It will still be a nonprofit aimed at researching best practices for the hospitality industry, but its mission has been pared down for now to focus on sustainability and waste reduction initiatives. “Like many restaurants, we were a bit too ambitious and we were just underfunded,” says Lee. “We’re doing about 80 percent of the mission statement that we started out with. Just the logistics of everything that we were doing was just too much.” Given its 501(c)(3) status, the restaurant can’t fundraise like a traditional restaurant that takes on investors and gives out shares. “Because we’re a nonprofit, investors aren’t allowed to profit, so it’s just not as attractive a deal for most investors,” Lee says. The restaurant is getting funding from corporate sponsors, including Chase Sapphire and OpenTable, plus assistance from landlord Edens. But the individual donors it hoped would fill the gap “just didn’t happen.” The idea for the nonprofit research restaurant grew out of the Let’s Empower Employment (LEE) Initiative, co-founded by Lee and Lindsey Ofcacek in 2018 to build a “more diverse, compassionate, sustainable, and equitable restaurant industry.” To start, the restaurant’s main focus will be finding ways to eliminate plastic, gas usage, and waste over five years. That will mean initiatives as simple as getting rid of squeeze bottles and as ambitious as convincing purveyors to forgo single use plastics in their distribution system (no easy task given that’s how almost all food is delivered to restaurants). To do the latter, they’re developing a reusable, zippered, insulated bag that they hope to convince smaller farms to use to deliver their goods week after week. “There are certain things like rubber gaskets that go on equipment that we’ll have problems with, but [the goal is] really to eliminate all plastics, not just single use, in the entire restaurant, not just the kitchen,” Lee says. The restaurant will have a full-time research assistant and a partnership with a local university in order to record and eventually publish all its procedures, costs, and the labor necessary to implement its initiatives. (Lee says he can’t reveal who the university partner is just yet—”we’re still in the works.”) The goal is that restaurants across the country can then implement at least pieces of what they’re doing, or build off their experiments with their own ideas. A lot of it is just hoping to inspire and start a conversation, like, ‘Do you really need squeeze bottles? Because we plate this food beautifully and we don’t use any.’ If we can inspire 100 restaurants to get rid of the squeeze bottles, that’s a lot of plastic we just took out of the environment,” Lee says. Of course to do any of what it’s set out to do, Shia will also have to be a great restaurant. “We need to keep the place full so that we can collect data,” Lee explains. The chef is still working on a menu, but says it won’t be traditional Korean food—”something a little bit more innovative.” Lee also hopes to still do more fundraising so the nonprofit can expand its research to tackle other important industry issues. He says Shia will still have a local mentorship program and aims to experiment with different wage models going forward. The restaurant is meant to last no longer than its five-year lease. “When we speak to most independent restaurants across America, they don’t have the time, the money, quite honestly, the energy at the end of a work week to do this. They can’t do the work,” Lee says. “And so the point is, let us do it. Let us make the mistakes. Let us waste the money to try to do all these things. We’ll tell you what works and what doesn’t.”The post Chef Edward Lee’s Nonprofit Restaurant Will Be a DC Korean Spot with Lofty Environmental Goals first appeared on Washingtonian.