(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Restaurants love to flog their eco credentials these days. Menus are jammed with Fairtrade and B Corp credits; they drown in lists of nearby farm suppliers.
It’s a good turn of events for Americans who want their food to be more sustainable. But the ubiquity of terms such as “locally sourced” and “organic” has made them feel meaningless.
In response, the latest eco-minded chefs, bartenders and restaurant operators are each focusing on a particular avenue of conscious sourcing or cooking and putting its possibilities thoroughly to the test—in the process moving the goalposts for the entire industry.
“There really is a next generation of chefs digging into these issues and leaning in to specific pursuits,” says Dan Barber, a leading authority on sustainable practices.
Brady Williams, chef-owner at Tomo in Seattle, is the kind of cook Barber is referring to. He’s passionate about climate-proof wheat that doesn’t require vast resources to grow in changing weather. In Napa Valley, beverage director Natalia Faustino makes destination-worthy cocktails with ingredients usually thrown in the trash. The kitchen at Jordan Kahn’s Vespertine in LA is so efficient that there isn’t even a garbage can.
They’re among the seven leaders in the US that we’re heralding here, each championing a unique aspect of sustainability—and offering a view of how dining and drinking can evolve in America.
Closed-Loop Cocktails
Natalia Faustino, beverage manager at Little Saint in Healdsburg, California
At least once a week, Brazilian-born Faustino checks in with the Little Saint kitchen to see what new dishes they’re putting on the menu—“and what scraps they’ve been tossing,” she says. She then devises second lives for those ingredients in creative cocktails. Her vibrantly colored, tequila-spiked We’ve Got the Beet is made with the cooking liquid from an appetizer dip. The pulp left over from making strawberry-rhubarb syrup is fermented with spices to concoct a nonalcoholic drink. She also gets the most out of lemons: By sprinkling rinds with citric acid, she draws out six times more juice. (She uses a hand-press juicer to reduce her carbon footprint, too.)
Faustino estimates 80% of her well spirits come from local producers such as Griffo Distillery in Petaluma and Sipsong Spirits, a neighbor in Healdsburg, which cuts down on shipping emissions.
Regenerative Ocean Farming
Rob Rubba, chef-partner of Oyster Oyster in Washington, DC
Oysters barely feature on the menu at Rubba’s light-soaked neighborhood restaurant; the food he’s served for five years is almost all plant-based. But there’s always a bivalve course—right now they’re garnished with preserved green strawberries and shiso oil made with herbs from his garden.
They’re fundamental in other ways, however. “Wild oysters in our area are in desperate need of revival,” Rubba says. He estimates that the Chesapeake Bay contains less than 1% of the oysters it once had. To that end, he sources the ones he serves from two sustainable local farms, Valiant Oyster Co. and Oyster Point Oyster Co. He returns the leftover shells to them to help rebuild eroding bay reefs. (He keeps a few deep shells to hold votive candles made with leftover cooking oil.) The restaurant has invested in a $100,000 machine to grind empty wine bottles into sand, which helps resupply the shoreline.
Zero-Kilometer Sourcing
Anastasia Worrell, owner of the Green House in Wilmington, North Carolina
North Carolina is one of the largest pork producers in the US, but you won’t find the other white meat at Worrell’s three-year-old restaurant—it’s not sustainably farmed.
For now, her ambitious menu is plant-based. Worrell, who was born in Moldova, favors a European-style “zero-kilometer” approach to sourcing: Everything on the menu is as local as possible. Several of the restaurant’s ingredients come from the on-site greenhouse, including soft leaf arugula, kale and microgreens. She also relies on small family-owned farms that are a 15-minute drive away. The lion’s mane mushrooms that feature in the Green House’s bestselling entrée—they’re smoked, grilled and sliced, then served with chimichurri and mushroom jus—are sourced from the home of a guy who lives downtown. “We just want to serve what we have here,” Worrell says.
Zero-Waste Cooking
Jordan Kahn, chef-owner of two-Michelin-starred Vespertine in Los Angeles
Kahn’s restaurant doesn’t have a trash can. Instead, all the peels, bones and offal that go unused are repurposed on-site or forwarded to his two other restaurants, the plant-filled Meteora and the all-day cafe Destroyer. (Kahn installed a research-and-development chef, Justin Ealy, to be a kind of air traffic controller for getting waste from one dining room to another.)
For a course featuring glitter squid, a species considered invasive, Kahn coats the body with black Peruvian sugar and sears it for an earthy caramelized crust. The accompanying sauce is enhanced with the squid’s tentacles and head, parts that often get tossed. Even the skin and eyes are used to make cat treats that sell at Destroyer, where you can also find dog snacks made from fish innards and guinea hen trimmings.
Climate-Proof Grains
Brady Williams, chef of Tomo in Seattle
Even before he arrived in Seattle in 2015, Williams had Washington State University’s Breadlab on his radar. The school’s agricultural research unit and bakery had worked on wheat initiatives with companies including Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. to craft a better tortilla.
Williams is now promoting the lab’s products at his ambitious American-Japanese restaurant, where he showcases fast-growing buckwheat by grinding it into tortilla-style chips and soba noodles. He’s also experimenting with a new Breadlab product, Climate Proof Wheat, a regenerative blend of varieties grown by the lab to support plant diversity and minimize waste; you’ll find it in focaccia and several of Williams’ freshly milled pastas, such as crimped cascatelli.
Menu Transparency
Alizée Wyckmans, chief of staff at Le Botaniste in New York City
Among the myriad options in Manhattan for a stylish plant-based meal, the Belgium-based mini-chain Le Botaniste stands out. Part of that is because of Wyckmans, who’s rigorous about how to be greener than the herd, so much so that menu space is devoted to the carbon emissions associated with each dish; the listing appears alongside the calorie count.
One of its bestsellers—pasta bolo, a quinoa fusilli tossed with a soy-protein-based Bolognese sauce and herb oil—has one of the lowest ratings on the menu: 0.2 kilograms (0.4 pounds) of CO2 emissions, including the energy it takes to import the ingredients and compostable utensils. That’s 90% less emissions than if the dish were made with meat. “The interest of our guests on this subject continues to grow,” Wyckmans says. “Customers tell us it’s the main reason they come back.”
Conscious Crops
Sebastian Vargas, chef of Krüs Kitchen in Miami
“A beautiful challenge” is how Vargas describes his experience opening this eco-friendly restaurant in Miami four years ago. For his ceviche, he found fishmongers who line-caught or speared their seafood; for vegetables, he needed farmers who weren’t growing unseasonal, fertilizer-blasted produce. Soon Vargas, who was born in Colombia and worked at New York’s Eleven Madison Park and Sweden’s Fäviken Magasinet, connected with Roberto Grossman, owner of Tiny Farm in Homestead, Florida. He helped him create a planting system based on milpa, the ancient South American practice of intercropping vegetables and fruits instead of planting only one and exhausting the soil.
“It’s uniting crops so they are interconnected,” Vargas says. “They share vitamins, minerals. Zucchini is more tasty if it’s planted with tomato, chiles if they’re planted near cacao.” Now he’s sourcing products such as sun gold tomatoes grown alongside okra, mizuna and long beans for his dishes and has helped the farm grow to almost seven times its original size.
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