Los Angeles : The Green Scene

Finger Fishing

BuzzEditor — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:24:00 GMT

iPhone's Seafood Watch App

Finding sustainable seafood just got a little easier thanks to two tech innovations pointed out to us by Joe Isidori of NYC's Harbour. With Blue Ocean Institute’s Fishphone, diners can find out about a particular seafood choice by texting 30644 with the message FISH and the name of the fish (or they can just visit fishphone.org). Meanwhile, iPhone users can download the Seafood Watch app from the Monterey Bay Aquarium for advice on environmentally aware eating; non-iPhone users can get the same info by going to mobile.seafoodwatch.org.

– Kathleen Squires

Eating Green

BuzzEditor — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:15:00 GMT

Photo: courtesy of midorisyu

In recent months, world attention has been focused on the shaky economic situation rather than the myriad troubles facing our planet. Which is exactly why we celebrate Earth Day each year on April 22, to remind us to take care of our ultimate natural resource. But where to eat after attending one of the special events planned for the day? We've rounded up a few eco-friendly restaurants where you can enjoy locally sourced fare that won't make you feel guilty about your carbon footprint.

* Mozza will be offering a special, organically sourced four-course menu (including local sea urchin) for the day.

Chefs Go Fishing for Sustainable Seafood

BuzzEditor — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:48:00 GMT

By Deirdre Donovan, ZAGAT.com Staff Editor

With new technologies, aquarium outreach programs and a local focus, more chefs are going green.

NYC chef Anita Lo serves Australis Barramundi.

Diners are riding a wave of awareness regarding threats to oceanlife – but they don’t always know what to do about it. When a recent ZAGAT.com poll asked, “Do concerns about over-fishing and other threats to seafood populations affect your dining decisions?” 54% of respondents said they “try to order sustainable seafood but can’t always keep track of what they are supposed to order.”

While there are ways for environmentally conscious diners to stay informed (see sidebar), chefs around the country are helping take the onus off customers by putting the “right” seafood on the menu. And since more than two-thirds (by value) of seafood consumed in the U.S. is eaten in restaurants, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, chefs have the potential to make a huge impact on the ocean’s health.

Find Your Fish

Organizations including Seafood Choices Alliance and Greenpeace offer charts and cards to help consumers make informed choices about the seafood on their plates. And some information has gone mobile – the status of an item on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch list can be checked via any handheld device, and the Blue Ocean Institute's FishPhone makes it easy to text for up-to-date info right from the table.

You don’t have to tell that to chef Ted Walter and wife Cindy, owners of Passionfish in Pacific Grove, CA. When they’re not preparing dishes featuring sustainable fish – for example, California sturgeon in charmoula marinade, or tilapia with garlic-balsamic-vinegar butter – they’re working to spread their mantra that "smart harvesting can strengthen global fish stocks" by offering public presentations, forums for culinary students and professionals, and through legislative advocacy. Cindy’s efforts helped lead to Pacific Grove’s adoption in 2005 of a Sustainable Seafood Resolution, making it one of only two cities to do so (San Francisco was the first). The resolution encourages restaurants and markets “to give preference to seafood harvested in a sustainable way” and to opt for local seafood.

Local is key at the East Coast Grill in Cambridge, MA, where chef-owner Chris Schlesinger, a fisherman himself, has long-standing relationships with providers that he trusts. “I stay informed about seafood stocks,” says Schlesinger, who features the likes of sea scallops from New Bedford, MA, harpooned swordfish and a daily fish that's "wicked fresh, wicked local" on his menu.

Seafood Choices Alliance partners with Charting Nature for illustrated posters with descriptions of sustainable fish and shellfish.

Growing your own can work too. San Francisco’s Hog Island Oyster Company raises its own Sweetwater, Atlantic and Kumomoto bivalves with sustainable methods in the Tomales Bay. Of course, not every restaurant can raise its own seafood. But there are plenty of other ways for toques to support healthy oceans.

Aquariums across the country have programs to promote sustainable seafood, including partnerships with restaurants. At Boston’s New England Aquarium, the Celebrate Seafood dinner series features sustainable seafood plus appearances by guest chefs from local restaurants like Beacon Hill Bistro, Chez Henri, Garden at the Cellar and Sel de la Terre. The evenings include cooking demos and discussions; the menus highlight wild-caught fish such as striped mullet, Alaskan salmon, mahi mahi, wahoo and bluefish along with responsibly farmed oysters, mussels, clams, bay scallops, barramundi and cobia.

In Chicago, the Shedd Aquarium’s Right Bite program not only partners with chefs for special dinners, but helps restaurants plan menus. Right Bite participants promise to have at least one sustainable seafood dish on their menus at all times and take off at least one unsustainable seafood item; their staffs receive special training twice a year. The program has attracted Carnivale, which features dishes like arctic char ceviche and Shaw’s Crab House, which serves items like sautéed Lake Erie Walleye with horseradish crust. Carrie Nahabedian has also signed up her top-rated Naha, whose sustainable dishes feature the likes of wild Great Lakes whitefish and native lobster.

Long a leader in ocean education, The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program began in 1999 as a way to raise consumer awareness. Sheila Bowman, the program’s outreach manager, explains that restaurants became involved when consumers, armed with seafood guides, went out to dinner and started asking questions. “At first chefs were like ‘What the heck is that aquarium doing?’” she says. But in the last two years a widespread shift occurred. “Chefs had started looking at where their beef, pork, produce, dairy and even wine came from before they started looking at seafood. Ultimately they looked at seafood,” says Bowman.

What is Sustainable Seafood?

SeaChoice describes it as "fish that are caught or farmed with consideration for the long-term viability of individual marine species and for the oceans’ ecological balance as a whole."

There’s now a restaurant component to Seafood Watch, with members pledging to eschew items from the organization’s “avoid” list. Participants include rm (Las Vegas), which brings the message to the table with farm-raised Ocean Rose Abalone and bigeye tuna that’s hook-and-line caught from a sustainable population in Hawaii; Ciudad (LA), where marinated white anchovy with lemon, garlic and parsley makes the menu; and Fish (Sausalito), which highlights seasonal fish, line-caught local albacore tuna and local Miyagi oysters.

Improved fish-farming techniques are another boon for sustainably minded chefs. Australis U.S.-farmed Barramundi, for example, is raised indoors with a special system that keeps the water clean. The fish meets environmental and sustainability standards and has been given a place on Seafood Watch’s “Best Choice” listing. It can be found on the menu at Napa’s famed French Laundry, where chef Thomas Keller serves it sautéed with potato confit, piquillo peppers, chorizo and arugula. At Charlie Palmer’s Las Vegas Aureole, it’s pan-seared and served with citrus-braised butter lettuce and carrot-orange reduction. In NYC, Anita Lo (Annisa) prepares it with artichokes, garlic chives and black trumpet sauce.

Kona Kampachi

Meanwhile, open-water aquaculture farms have modernized as well. Kona Kampachi, a Hawaiian yellowtail, is raised “from hatch to harvest” with improved nets and water monitoring systems, sustainable sources for feed and a harvest-to-order system that cuts waste. New York chef Dan Barber (Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns) offers it as a special in preparations such as crudo with panther soybeans and apple mustard. “Flavor is where we're leading with this stuff. I'm an environmentalist, but first and foremost, I'm a flavor guy...I decided to support this, getting behind the cause of how we want fish to be produced in the future," he says.

Local Motion

BuzzEditor — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 20:06:00 GMT

Eco-conscious diners can enjoy a special menu created from local ingredients at Grace.

When it comes to minimizing his carbon footprint, Grace chef-owner Neal Fraser is on the cutting edge. For one, he drives a diesel Mercedes that's been modified to run on used cooking oil from his restaurant. Now he's created a menu using ingredients that traveled 400 miles or less to his kitchen – a "Close to Home" prix fixe for $70 per person served Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays that's as much a tribute to the abundance of California as it is to Fraser's commitment to the future of the planet.

By necessity, the menu changes from day to day. But in recent weeks, it's included Santa Barbara prawns in a sea urchin emulsion, fresh Monterey Bay sardines and a pan-roasted California white sea bass, along with braised lamb with Humboldt Fog goat cheese and filet of beef from the Brandt Family Ranch near the Mexican border. And his 400-mile menu is just the beginning – in the not-too-distant future, Fraser hopes to winnow it down to 100 miles. Give him a few fertile backyards, and he'll get that down to walking distance.

– Merrill Shindler

Five Paths to a Greener Restaurant

BuzzEditor — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 20:10:00 GMT

By Deirdre Donovan, ZAGAT.com staff editor

The restaurant industry reinvents itself with an eco-conscious eye

London's Acorn House

Photo: Cindy Chen

The greening of the restaurant industry, an idealistic movement that took root decades ago, is now a global phenomenon encompassing both community-based eateries and splashy hot spots. And diners seem primed to appreciate environmentally sensitive cuisine – according to our 2007 America's Top Restaurants guide, 65% of surveyors said they would pay more for food that has been sustainably raised or procured.

But exactly what makes a restaurant green is open to interpretation. For some, it means menus emphasizing concepts like "local," "sustainable" and "organic." For others, it means harnessing alternative energy sources (bicycle-powered blender, anyone?) or banning bottled water.

Below are some ways in which restaurants are going green, followed by a list of resources for the conscientious epicure.

Know Your Sources

One of the most common ways restaurants embrace the green movement is by cultivating relationships with area farmers, a simple idea with far-reaching impact pioneered by Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, which opened in 1971. Today the restaurant works with 60-plus farms, and Waters continues to lead from the front with the Chez Panisse Foundation, which promotes food awareness in public schools.

No longer limited to bohemian Berkeley, responsible food sourcing is now practiced at big-ticket eateries coast-to-coast. In LA, Grace’s Neal Fraser sources 90% of his ingredients from local ranchers who provide their animals with healthy diets and local farmers who reject pesticides. In the Chicago area, Vie's Paul Virant exclusively uses meat and dairy products raised humanely with 100% vegetarian feed and no hormones or chemicals. Celebrity chef Laurent Tourondel’s new BLT Market in NYC’s Ritz-Carlton Central Park features a monthly changing menu focused on first-of-the-season produce and wild and unusual items grown locally.

Some toques are following Waters' lead by promoting social change outside of the kitchen: Ted Walter (Passionfish in Pacific Grove, CA) advocates for sustainable seafood awareness, while Peter Hoffman (NYC's Savoy) works closely with both Chefs Collaborative, a national network of sustainably minded food professionals, and NYC’s Greenmarket.

Become a Farmer

Some restaurants take the farm-to-table movement a step further and grow their own food. When Dan Barber opened NYC’s Blue Hill in 2000, he supplied part of the restaurant’s produce from his Berkshires family farm. Four years later he expanded that vision by opening Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a restaurant and educational center on a diversified organic farm 30 miles up the Hudson River where the entire menu comes from ingredients grown or raised on-site. Similarly, Farm 255 in Athens, GA, uses produce from its own seven-acre biodynamic farm as a way to “reconnect food to its roots and people to their food.”

Real estate at a premium? No problem. Growing your own doesn’t require acres of land. Rick Bayless of Chicago’s Frontera Grill and Topolobampo grows chiles and tomatoes, mainstays of his menu, up on the restaurants' roof.

Reduce Waste

Restaurants are finding creative ways to make better use of their limited resources. Hugo Matheson and Kimbal Musk, owners of The Kitchen in Boulder, CO, are particularly innovative when it comes to reducing waste. For example, sacks from their coffee roaster are passed to a local farm where they’re used for vegetable storage over winter. Vegetables from the farm then go to the restaurant. The Kitchen claims to eliminate close to 100% of its refuse thanks to such methods, along with mindful food preparation and vigorous composting and recycling.

Another fan of using more and disposing less is Chris Cosentino of San Francisco’s Incanto; he promotes nose-to-tail eating with an adventurous menu prepared in a kitchen that throws away no animal parts. Also in San Francisco, Jardinière recycles or composts almost 85% of its waste and plans to list composting locations on its Web site to help its neighbors do the same.

Increase Energy Efficiency

According to the Green Restaurant Association, restaurants use 33% of the electricity gobbled up by U.S. businesses each year. Alternative power can help offset this. Colorado wind farms provide electricity to the lean and clean Kitchen – the restaurant even donates all leftover cooking oils to a biodiesel-fuel-using neighbor.

In New Brunswick, NJ, The Frog and the Peach recently mounted 58 solar panels on its roof that it hopes will generate 20–25% of its electricity and eliminate 24,000 pounds in carbon dioxide emissions yearly.

Other energy innovators include Chicago’s Hannah's Bretzel, which makes its deliveries with a fuel-efficient, low-emission MINI Cooper; NYC's Del Posto, which recently announced it will join Chez Panisse and others in eliminating bottled water; and the Brooklyn outpost of Café Habana, which uses kinetic energy from a bicycle to power its blender.

Use Eco-minded Products

Restaurants can reduce their impact on the environment by avoiding the use of harmful chemicals and finding alternative sources for common materials. LA's Abode was built using wood planks reclaimed from a 200-year-old Temecula farm. London's Acorn House keeps spruce with eco-friendly cleaning products. And the tables at Chicago’s organic pizza lounge Crust are constructed from recycled tires.

Additional Resources:
Chefs Collaborative
Chez Panisse Foundation
Eat Wild
Green Restaurant Association
Michael Pollan
Seafood Watch
SeaWeb
Slow Food USA
Sustainable Table
Watch the creation of London's Acorn House
What to Eat

Wanted: Small Farms, Big Flavors

BuzzEditor — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 16:28:00 GMT

Sona's tomato salad with purslane

Step into the kitchen at Sona, and David Myers – the restaurant's visionary chef-owner – will proudly show you a rolling rack on which slightly odd-looking fruits and vegetables are carefully, even lovingly, arranged.

"They're foraged for us from small farms up and down the coast," he says. "These are farms too small to show up at the farmer's markets. They grow produce of extraordinary quality."

Myers is one of an increasing number of chefs discovering wonderful stuff growing on small plots and in the backyards of California – irregularly shaped produce with a fine, fresh flavor. Occasionally a passionate local gardener will show up at a restaurant's back door selling such booty. But increasingly it is professional foragers buying these crops from small farmers, then rushing them to chefs who prefer quality over quantity – among them, Jimmy Boyce at Studio in Laguna Beach's Montage Resort & Spa, Lee Hefter at Spago, Suzanne Goin at Lucques and A.O.C. and, of course, the queen of foraged produce, Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley.

"Part of the fun," says Myers, "is that you never know what's coming in. You have to improvise. That's when cooking becomes like jazz."