TRASH TALK

Discover the restaurants putting the waste line before the bottom line

In an industry of excess and indulgence, there’s a growing movement

towards minimising waste in the upscale restaurant kitchen.

Chloe Sachdev speaks to those in Hong Kong who are championing a more

sustainable way of feeding the masses

Juicy whole chickens roasting above smouldering coals, dripping ribs of beef and entire carcasses of Mangalica pigs—it’s not a scene you’d expect to find in the kitchen of the stereotypical eco-conscious restaurant. But Nate Green, the head chef and culinary director of Rhoda in Sai Ying Pun, has upended the usual notions of sustainability with his nose-to-tail restaurant. Cooking almost exclusively without electricity and creating dishes from all the parts of the livestock, the frequently changing menus transcend ticking the trend boxes.

Determined to reduce his restaurant’s carbon footprint without compromising on quality, Green uses secondary cuts and offal to minimise waste. He explains the approach: “If we have a bit of beef left from the Sunday roast, we’ll chop it up and turn it into shepherd’s pie.” Having a frequently changing menu allows for this kind of flexibility, plus cooking with fire means Rhoda doesn’t waste any natural gas. All the wood used in the kitchen is from windfall, so no trees are cut down to make the charcoal, meaning it’s carbon-neutral.

Green is among a cluster of waste-wary pioneering chefs who are re-educating and shaping the food and drinks industry, aiming to leave a positive impact rather then a hefty footprint. But it’s not always a straightforward task. When heavy criticism fell on Rhoda for running out of the ever-popular lamb shoulder—an overreaction Green dubs “Lambgate”—his response was: “Of course we did! We use whole animals and lambs only have two shoulders… It’s not a conspiracy. We’re just trying to be ethical.”

Buying two lambs a week and using the animals in their entirety is preferable to purchasing 20 to 30 lamb racks, where he can’t be sure if the rest of the animal is being put to good use, Green explains. “When we buy the whole animal, we use all the innards—we use everything. We take the hearts, spleens and livers and use them throughout the menu. It’s not about giving up meat and fish, but rather about consuming it in a more sustainable way.”

Peggy Chan, the founder of Grassroots Pantry, may differ in her approach to sustainability by focusing on a rootto-stem plant-based model, but her commitment to low waste is equally unwavering. “There are rarely any leftovers at Grassroots,” she says. “If there was a mistake and we over-ordered, there’s always a crafty way to use them, be it fermenting, culturing or preserving. We don’t allow for food that’s edible to be thrown into the garbage.” Her restaurant, which produces less than 40kg of food waste a day, was the first restaurant in Hong Kong to install the Orca, a digestive machine that turns food waste into environmentally safe water that flows straight into the municipal sewage system with minimal methane.

Chan cites the lack of transparency in the recycling and waste disposal industries in Hong Kong as a major problem for the restaurant business. Hong Kong doesn’t have its own facilities to recycle waste in the city, so instead it gets transported to Southeast Asia or Mainland China, she explains. There, it gets very difficult to track and therefore nearly impossible to find out what the waste gets turned into.

For Green, the issue of recycling causes a similar frustration. “For me to recycle at Rhoda, it means I have to store my recycling garbage somewhere for three to four days before it even gets collected.”

To tackle the problem of restaurant waste in Hong Kong, Grassroots Pantry—along with 19 other cafes and restaurants in the Soho area—came together in 2016 to form the Zero Waste Alliance of Restaurants HK; they’re now in the process of trialling a new food waste company to collect the waste in a proper, transparent manner. “We don’t believe what was going on previously was acting with integrity,” says Chan.

Like Grassroots Pantry, Mana—the trio of plant-based eco-conscious restaurants that includes Mana Cafe, Mana Fast Slow Food and Mana Xpress—is another member of the Zero Waste Alliance. It also cites Hong Kong’s waste management problem as a big one. As a solution, food scraps are gathered and sorted weekly by Mana’s staff before being driven to organic farms in the New Territories for composting. The result is nearly 2.5 tonnes of organic waste a month that’s composted rather than exported to an unknown fate. Mana estimates that more than 100 tonnes of food waste and leftovers have thereby been disposed of sustainably since its opening in 2012.

All this goes to prove that sustainability isn’t just a bit of trash talk—rather, it’s a new way of operating that, for the sake of the planet, puts the waste line before the bottom line.