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Bay Area – September 2007
Restaurants with a Conscience Served Up in the Bay Area
by Alistair Bland
The restaurant biz is not easy, as demonstrated by the constant turnover of dining concepts in any given neighborhood. Even for the successful, profit margins are slim and the temptation to cut prices may ride heavy on the heart of many a manager. Yet a few noble restaurants voluntarily take on added responsibilities as they struggle to tread water, and the San Francisco Bay Area is a hotspot of eateries that provide exceptional service while going to extremes to minimize their impact on the environment.
The Village Pub in Woodside, south of San Francisco, could be the epitome of environmental harmony in the restaurant industry. It was established in 2002 by Bacchus Management, a corporate conglomerate of three who envisioned a fine dining establishment of grade-A California fodder founded on principles of ecological soundness. The trio – Andrew Green, Tim Stannard and Chef Mark Sullivan – settle for no less than local, organic produce. And they’ve gone far beyond that. Bacchus Management also leases five acres of a large farm, SMIP Ranch, several miles from the restaurant. Eighty-five percent of The Village Pub’s produce is grown here. The farm products arrive three times weekly in a truck that runs on biofuel. The biofuel comes from the restaurant’s kitchen, which includes a processing apparatus for prepping the used cooking oil for use as auto fuel. And the kitchen also turns over every organic scrap of waste to be returned by the same truck to the farm for composting. It’s a nearly perfect cycle.
In San Francisco, Jardinière, owned by Traci Des Jardins, has enjoyed a decade of success in Hayes Valley while serving top-notch California-French cuisine. Des Jardins and executive chef Craig Patzer minimize the restaurant’s potential negative impacts on the community and the environment by sourcing from local farmers and fishermen as well as composting and recycling like there’s no tomorrow. Winner of the Commercial Recycler of the Year Award in 2001, Jardinière sends only 10 percent of the restaurant’s 300-odd pounds of daily waste to the landfill.
Chef Patzer previously cooked at a restaurant in Dallas, where few people, he reports, recycled or composted; nearly everything went to the landfill. Even in San Francisco, most restaurants don’t bother with separating their waste. But Patzer is hardly discouraged. “We prefer to consider that we’re at the leading edge of a growing trend,” he says.
Chef Patzer may be right. San Francisco city planners intend to launch a program next year which would supply Muni, the city’s public transportation system, with as much as 12,000 gallons of biodiesel fuel per month––and there’s hardly a better source of grease than the city’s many busy restaurants. Jardinière produces five gallons of waste grease per day – a relatively small amount, says Patzer, but other restaurants may produce 50 gallons, and the disposal of such oil waste costs hundreds of dollars per week. The city collection service would be free, however, and would immediately invite all restaurants into a communal effort toward waste reduction.
Meanwhile, still other cafes and diners are taking their own initiatives. Luna Park, a 7-year-old bistro in the Mission District, began delivering takeout orders last year, says owner A.J. Gilbert.
He says, “Delivering can be pretty wasteful, with the packaging and the car trip, and we decided that to offset the ecological footprint, we’d use an electric car.”
Gilbert has located a promising model that can travel 20 to 40 miles per charge – perfect, he says, for the mileage required for a night’s worth of deliveries.
“Driving around with an electric car painted with ‘Luna Park’ would be great publicity,” says Gilbert. “It would also align with local sentiments, would be cheaper for us to pay for and would be good for the environment. We win all around.”
Molly Zucker of Wagstaff Worldwide, a PR firm for several eco-friendly restaurants in Northern California, notes that most environmentally sound business practices take place behind the scenes, suggesting that many restaurant managers – even in a time of declining restaurant profitability – are “going green” for reasons beyond looking good.
“Some things, like organic foods and the recycled menus, are obvious to the customers, but other things they never even see,” says Zucker. “It really shows a concern for things beyond making money, and they deserve to be acknowledged.”
Jardinière’s Patzer notes the challenges of succeeding in the dining business today, even without the added burden of considering the environment: “It’s become a lot more difficult to turn profits. Increased food costs are a hardship. The increased minimum wage has affected us, and the mandatory health care issue will certainly put some restaurants out of business.” Yet Jardinière sticks to the recycling and composting routine. The effort transpires mostly in the alleyway out back, and the task of divvying up the waste goes unseen by most patrons and does little to help business.
“But it’s not about impressing our customers,” said Patzer. “It’s really just a matter of doing the right thing.”
Alistair Bland is a journalist in San Francisco. He frequently writes of travel and the outdoors and contributes regularly to several newspapers and magazines throughout the West. He may be reached at allybland@yahoo.com.