When artist Dominique Chestand started Broke Babe Supper Club in 2018, she was, in fact, broke. She was also hungry for connection.
“I was dating a bookseller who gave me access to a ton of free books,” she tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “After a while, I realized I was only collecting cookbooks. I wanted to explore cooking techniques and cuisines that could be made within my budget.”
What began as a series of dinners in her home has grown into a larger conversation about food, care, and survival. “Cooking for friends and family made me realize that I knew a lot of people who were unfamiliar with the produce available to them,” she says. “I wanted to highlight that food in a way that didn’t patronize the people around me.”
From there, Broke Babe Supper Club has developed into an art project and community platform examining the relationships between hunger, class, and creativity. Each meal is part storytelling, part social practice, an experiment in what Dominique calls the aesthetics of survival.
Chestand’s approach to vegan and vegetarian cooking rejects the exclusivity of mainstream wellness culture. “When I watch vegan chefs online, they’re always using rare ingredients that you can’t find in the hood,” she says. “It’s not accessible. That’s why this iteration of the project includes research focused on finding the foods available in the lowest-income neighborhoods of U.S. cities like Pittsburgh, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York.”
That research led Chestand to places like Hilltop Urban Farm in Pittsburgh’s St. Clair neighborhood, a community officially designated as a food desert by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “Some of the produce they grow goes to the local food bank,” she explains. “Community members help decide what crops are grown in the following seasons. Some even grow food on their own plots. That’s a big deal in a neighborhood that only has a couple corner stores within walking distance.”
Her work intersects with local organizations such as Grow Pittsburgh and 412 Food Rescue, both of which address food insecurity at a structural level. Broke Babe Supper Club’s most recent event, The Chef as an Artist: Portraiture on the Plate, held on Oct. 5 at Shiloh Farm in Homewood, gathered artists, community members, and growers — inculding artist Njaimeh Njie, Jasmine M. Cho of Butter & Joy Bakery, and Greg Austin of 412 Food Rescue — for an evening that was equal parts meal, performance, and education.
“Quite a few people said they had passed by the farm many times but didn’t know what it was until the event,” she says. “That’s exactly what I set out to do: expose people to the food and resources that already exist within their own communities.”
Beyond community dinners, Chestand collects ceramic works and still-life photos that reflect on hunger, history, and American imperialism. “I’m interested in the history of hunger as it relates to American imperialism,” she says. “That’s obviously a vast topic, but it’s tied to the systems that shape what we eat, how we eat, and who gets to eat.”
She also plans to create a website featuring recipes that “solely utilize ingredients found in low-income neighborhoods.”
For Chestand, the politics of care are inseparable from funding. “Care means considering how money affects the people who exist in the spaces I create,” she says. “If I don’t have the money to pay my collaborators, that event or project doesn’t happen until I find the money.”
That stance is increasingly vital at a time when federal cuts threaten the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and have deepened food insecurity nationwide. To that end, Broke Babe Supper Club fills an interesting role in Pittsburgh, where, like many cities, urban farms, food banks, and artists are often the last line of defense against hunger. The project goes a step further by transforming dinner tables into spaces for dialogue, nourishment, and cultural memory.
But sustaining the mission requires the same kind of investment we expect for public programs. “When I think of who I want to create events for, I think of low-income creatives and creatives of color,” Chestand says. “People who cultivate culture, but who are frequently denied access to the institutions that benefit off their creative labor.”
Chestand’s dream version of Broke Babe Supper Club is simple: more free dinners.
“Watching people connect with each other over food is one of my favorite forms of intimacy,” she says. “Growing closer to someone while feeding the body is the most human thing you can do.”
This article appears in Nov. 19-25, 2025.
