Going out to eat is expensive. As a chef, Ryan Shelton knows this. His fine dining restaurant, Merchant Roots, is among the city’s more expensive tasting menus (priced at $238 per person). It’s a precarious balance of operation costs and salaries versus
what diners are willing to pay for the experience of Merchant Roots’s fanciful, themed dinner menus that change quarterly. It’s a cost-prohibitive experience, and Shelton’s been thinking of ways to lessen the burden. “The level of investment it takes to really experience Merchant Roots is a bit high,” he says, “so I’ve been trying to find a way to make it easy.”
Enter Masala y Maiz. The Michelin-starred Mexico City restaurant run by Saqib Keval and Norma Listman opened in 2017 and offers “paga lo que puedas” or “pay what you can” days. Guests receive a menu without prices, and customers pay what they can afford or feel is the value of the meal. In 2026, Listman and Keval are spreading the idea internationally, setting up a Pay What You Can day on Wednesday, August 26, with participating restaurants across Mexico, the U.S., India, Cuba, and more. In the Bay Area, Bombera, Merkado, Reem’s, Sfizio, Understory, and Valley Swim Club have all signed up to take part.
“I heard about [Listman and Keval] in Mexico City, and they had finally put to words the thing that I wanted to do, and so that’s why we’re doing it now,” Shelton says. Merchant Roots’s pricing is “very much based on what my staff needs to make,” Shelton says, but with this, he can welcome more people in. “I want more people to get to experience Merchant Roots, and especially, multiple facets of Merchant Roots, hopefully multiple themes,” he says. “And I feel like now I have the language to figure out how to put that out there.”
Shelton, however, is taking things beyond a singular day; he’s set aside the first Tuesday of every month as a Pay What You Want meal for the remainder of 2026. Diners can book a reservation (at no cost) for those days via Tock.
The idea has quietly caught on. The first Pay What You Want dinners are Tuesday, August 4, and the team quietly released the reservations for August and September on the restaurant’s reservation platform. Both are already sold out. And as of this writing, Pay What You Want reservations only remain for November, December, and January 2027.
Shelton made the program possible by adding a couple more dollars per ticket for regular reservations throughout the month. “The finances do happen to work out, but for me, it’s more about having a little peace of mind about my regular ticket price,” he says.
As for who Shelton wants to come in on those nights, he “looks forward to being surprised.” He’s hoping that the days will make his dinners more accessible for folks in the hospitality industry or education, for example, or anyone who considers a tasting menu a “once in a lifetime kind of expense.” Shelton adds: “I think fine dining should be for everybody … It shouldn’t just be for the people that have disposable income.”
When asked what his benchmark is for a successful Pay What You Want program, Shelton says, “If someone who had written off fine dining came to one of my Pay What You Want nights and told me that they found something to get them excited about dining again, that would be amazing to me. That’s the benchmark for what I’m looking for.”
Merchant Roots (1148 Mission Street, San Francisco) is open Tuesday through Saturday, with seatings at 5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. Reservations for Pay What You Want and other nights are available on Tock.
