While Elon Musk busies himself developing futuristic cars and the colonization of Mars, his baby brother has taken on a more flavorful challenge.
While Elon Musk busies himself developing futuristic cars and the colonization of Mars, his baby brother has taken on a more flavorful challenge.
Kimbal Musk—who at 43 years old is a year younger than Elon—plans to open a fast-food restaurant that offers only healthy and locally-sourced foods with menu prices hovering around $5 for every item, reports Tech Insider. It will be called “The Kitchenette,” and the first location will open in Memphis, Tennessee, in August.
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Opening The Kitchenette is challenging in the current restaurant climate. A spate of fast-casual restaurants have sprung up over the last several years, each offering more healthful menus than their fast-food cousins such as McDonald’s and Burger King. While Chipotle $CMG Mexican Grill, Sweetgreen and Dig Inn seek to draw consumers with fresher foods, their prices remain relatively steep.
A salad at Sweetgreen runs at about $10, and good luck filling a burrito from Chipotle for less than $9. That leaves a sweet spot that Musk wants to fill, but finding a way to keep prices on local, fresh foods low will be a challenge. Musk wants to source from local farmers and use only certified organic ingredients. To keep prices capped, he has said he plan to work with farms to source meat and vegetables in bulk, and to only use ingredients that are in season.
The younger Musk is no stranger to food world. In the early 2000s he moved from California to New York and enrolled in classes at the French Culinary Institute. He started The Kitchen, a small but growing chain of successful community restaurants with locations in Colorado and Illinois. The Kitchen was designed to convey the sense of a kitchen in one’s home and to encourage patrons to talk to one another and even share food. In 2011, he co-founded The Kitchen Community, a non-profit geared at introducing kids to food by working in gardens.
