COOKING YOUR GREENS

What makes for a true eco-friendly restaurant? Beware of the hype and think local, says our columnist. STACEY TEO

I’ve been around long enough to know that not everything labelled homemade is made at home and that a lot of so-called ‘fresh fish’ on a menu hasn’t been fresh since it was thrown into the flash freezer in the belly of a trawler somewhere off the coast of Mauritania months ago. The same is true of the eco-friendly movement in the restaurant business. Scratch the surface at some restaurants and beneath the low energy light bulbs and locally sourced lettuce lies a whole different reality, and sometimes it isn’t really very friendly at all.

It’s unfortunate but understandable. Everyone wants to be labelled ‘Green.’ It brings in clients. The problem is that it’s not easy for a restaurant to become truly eco-friendly. Many restaurateurs are struggling to survive on very small profit margins. Any added expense can mean doom. And most of the steps they need to take cost money, at least initially. Over time, many will pay for themselves but the need to make money is often immediate.

Another problem is that unlike a lot of other types of businesses, geography counts for restaurants. It’s a lot easier to be environmentally friendly in some places than in others. Reducing your carbon footprint in Boston or Dublin by buying locally produced goods or even growing some of it yourself is a lot simpler than it is for a restaurant in Moscow or Dubai. Take my home location for example. Getting local seafood is not a problem, but beef, lamb and vegetables are a different story. You don’t see a lot of farms in Singapore and most places don’t have the space to grow their own. The best we can do is rely on ecofriendly suppliers whenever possible, buy seasonal products and refrain from serving certain dishes. For example, at our seafood restaurant at Montigo Resorts in Nongsa (to be launched in early 2012), shark’s fin won’t be on our menu even though it’s a very popular dish, we’ve consciously decided to exclude it even though it is a very popular dish.

Apart from sourcing locally, there’s a lot that can be done no matter where a restaurant is located. Some steps are so simple they almost seem silly, like reusing coffee grounds in the ashtrays, purifying your own water or minimizing the use of packaging like foil or plastic wrap. One of the most important is portion control. I am a big proponent of controlling the amount of food served to the client. Some restaurants use huge portions as a draw for clients. It’s a gimmick and it’s wasteful and it means that you end up throwing out a lot of uneaten food.

Let’s face it, being eco-friendly does involve a little extra effort and calls for some added creativity. Buying seasonal produce or local sourcing obviously limits the dishes you can prepare. And since we no longer keep our ovens on all day, we need to cook things on a schedule and sometimes the dishes need to be adjusted to the oven hours. Cooking oil is also a good case in point. These days many restaurants clean and reuse their oil, either with their own machine or through a service provided by the supplier. No matter how you do it, the cleaning process invariably changes the flavour of the oil meaning it creates new flavours and recipes then need to be tweaked as a consequence. So you need to be a bit more creative.

As the group I oversee grows, the steps we take will depend on where the kitchen will be located. The environment, the location and the circumstances of a kitchen will determine what green efforts we can implement. The team is also really important and sometimes it’s difficult to get the whole team to cooperate on these efforts since, like I said, it sometimes involves a bit more work.

Sometimes just figuring out what is the right thing to do is hard enough, especially when kitchens face the difficulty of having to comply with local health regulations when implementing eco friendly efforts. This can turn something as simple as cleaning a countertop into a debate. What do you think, paper wipes or a cloth? Most of us would immediately think the cloth is the way to go because the paper means trees being cut down, waste, etc. But then you find out that regulations state that the cloth needs to be soaked in a chemical wash after use. Neither sounds very good, does it? We are looking into non-harmful chemical soaking agents and wipes that use recycled paper. In the fight to stay green in the kitchen, creativity is your best weapon.

Stacey Teo, Executive Chef at KOP Hotels & Resorts