NYC’s first ‘Make Food, Not Waste’ restaurant week aims to produce zero waste

Zero waste doesn’t mean zero taste, if you ask these top chefs.

A dozen of New York City’s most celebrated restaurants and bars have accepted the challenge to produce no food waste for an entire week as part of the first-ever Make Food, Not Waste Restaurant Week. Pegged to the citywide mandatory composting program that begins next week, kitchens across the Big Apple are getting creative to reduce, reuse and recycle their ingredients in the tastiest way possible, from Sept. 30 through Oct. 6.

Participating locations include Michelin-approved Musket Room, Loring Pace, Rezdôra and Win Son and newer hot spots such as Bar Contra and Corima, among others.

“Food waste is pretty much unavoidable in restaurants, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do better,” James Beard Award-winning chef Dan Kluger, owner of Loring Place and executive chef at Greywind, told The Post. “It felt like a great opportunity to push ourselves and explore new ways to reduce waste.”

Taka Sakaeda, chef and partner at Nami Nori, told The Post that Make Food, Not Waste helped spark “new ideas.”

“While we’ve been composting for some time … we pushed our creativity further.”

Food is the single largest item in landfills and produces methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide and a significant cause of climate change. It’s an issue very dear to many chefs’ hearts — and tummies.

“For us, as a restaurant centered around ocean-fresh cuisine, the state of our oceans hits especially close to home,” Sakaeda added. “Imagine a future where overfishing and pollution have devastated marine life — we couldn’t serve sushi without fish! It’s a stark reality we want to help prevent.”

To highlight their commitment, each eatery will be serving a new dish or cocktail that embodies their innovative approach to no-waste cooking.

Restaurants participating in Make Food, Not Waste and their exclusive items:

• Bar Blondeau: Smoked salmon toast
• Bar Contra: Stumble bee cocktail with Meyer lemon peel-y juice, infused gin and honey
• Corima: Kampachi crudo and kampachi “empanada”
• Greywind: Panzanella salad (at the bakery) and caramelized bread pudding French toast with stone fruit sherbet
• June: Corn husk polenta with charred corn, Sonoran corn puree and corn stock, with grilled yellow peaches tossed in chipotle and Jimmy Nardellos
• Le Crocodile: Waldorf salad and apple cake
• Loring Place: Corn husk wrapped halibut with polenta tomato marmalade and herbs
• The Musket Room: Fried plantain panna cotta with curry ice cream, plantain peel caramel, peanut praline snow and a rye peanut crunch and butternut sassafras soda with maple sorbet
• Nami Nori: Lobster dip with yuzu gelée, celery and crispy rice chips
• Rezdôra: Mozzarella di bufala con pomodorini with mixed cherry tomatoes and basil
• Rhodora: Savory fruit salad with citrus supreme, jicama, aguachile, chilies, herbs and herb oil
• Win Son: Marinated cucumbers, with garlic and cilantro

“Each dish shows off how we use things that might normally go to waste,” Kluger explained.

Fabian von Hauske of Bar Contra told The Post that working with his team, including Chef Jeremiah Stone, to produce zero waste has made their brainstorming sessions “more fun.”

“It makes you creative,” he said. “Now that we’ve started thinking like that, everyone is constantly seeing what would be waste and then trying to do something else with it.”

The new Make Food, Not Waste Restaurant Week additions utilize trims, peels and scraps from other dishes to inspire new offerings.

“The burnt corn husk dashi is a great sample as corn husks are typically the first thing in the trash in a lot of kitchens. However, they actually contain so much flavor, especially when burnt,” Fidel Caballero, chef and owner of Corima, told The Post of his dish.

Along with being deliciously ingenious with their ingredients, all restaurants participating in Make Food, Not Waste Restaurant Week will utilize Mill food recyclers, which dry and grind food scraps to be used in a composting process or turned into chicken feed.

“New York is a city that cares deeply about food and has an amazing restaurant culture — and chefs keenly understand the importance of valuing our food,” Harry Tannenbaum, co-founder and president of Mill, told The Post.

The initiative comes just as the city will begin weekly curbside composting pickups for all residential buildings in Manhattan, The Bronx and Staten Island on Oct. 6.

The final step in the citywide rollout of the program — which kicked off in Brooklyn and Queens earlier this year — will turn collected materials into renewable energy to heat homes or into compost sold to landscapers and given away free to New Yorkers.  

“It’s important because the world, regardless of whether we deny it, is changing,” Aidan O’Neal, chef at Le Crocodile, told The Post.

“Parts of food systems will collapse, and continuing to run any business at status quo will inevitably lead to failure. There is a real opportunity to reframe luxury, away from being expensive and wasteful, to being creative and abundant. There is an entire history of squeezing deliciousness out of every ounce of food we have, and returning to that is a great thing.”