What Fine Dining Looks Like With Absolutely No Plastic

A Washington DC chef is working to banish plastic from his restaurant entirely.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
What fine dining looks like with absolutely no plastic by
Anna Campboy read by Mark Lee. The modern fine dining
plate is enabled by plastic. The artful sauce squiggles and
dots they're delivered via plastic squeeze bottles, those other worldly
food shapes crafted by silicon molds. And that's not counting

(00:21):
the many plastic implements that never touch the plate, spatulas,
cutting boards, and plastic handled knives and pans. The restaurant
industry's reliance on plastic has become more and more drastic
over the years, says Edward Lee, a former Iron Chef
America contestant whose book Buttermilk Graffiti Artisan twenty eighteen won
a James Beard Foundation Book Award. It's not necessary. It's

(00:45):
just that it's so convenient, and it's so prevalent, and
it's everywhere that we don't even think about it. At Shiah,
his new non profit restaurant in Washington, DC, Lee is
doing far more than just thinking about plastic use. The
Korean outfit, which opened in November, is working toward eliminating
the stuff entirely staff or sauce out of a metal

(01:05):
pitcher like the once baristas used to heat milk at
coffee shops and spoon food into natural looking mounds instead
of dotting disposable gloves. They wash their hands more often.
Shia is part of a global push to make fine
dining more sustainable. While many chefs have been tackling the
food on the plate, reducing meat offerings, growing their own ingredients,

(01:26):
or sourcing from sustainable producers, some are now replacing gas
ranges with electric alternatives and switching to recycle tableware. Over
the past few years, the Michelin Guide has been doling
out Green Stars, distinct from standard Michelin Stars, to restaurants
that combine culinary excellence with outstanding eco friendly commitments. According

(01:46):
to the publication's North America Chief inspector, its list now
tops six hundred recipients. Restaurants contribute to the hundreds of
million tons of plastic waste produced every year, the vast
majority of which is not recycled. In addition to generating
greenhouse emissions, plastic shed tiny particles that have been found

(02:07):
everywhere from clouds to human brains. Lee, who owns restaurants
in Kentucky and Washington, d C. Considers every item within
them an ingredient trash cans and coat hangers included. We've
always tried to be sustainable in the food aspect of it,
he says, why wouldn't we be as careful and thoughtful
about those ingredients as well? At Chia, which can see

(02:29):
thirty five people at a time. That involved compiling a
detailed inventory of common plastic items in restaurants. Lee's team
then documented how staff usually uses them and how much
they cost in order to stack them against non plastic alternatives.
Their initial findings are outlined in a report published a
last month in collaboration with Open Table. Our mission is

(02:51):
to determine if the elevated costs of going zero plastic
are sustainable for a broad spectrum of restaurants, and if
consumers are willing to bear these added costs, it explains.
The document is nearly one hundred pages long. Take cling Wrap,
a she assized operation would go through around six rolls
a month to cover containers of prepped food, at a

(03:12):
cost of roughly two hundred ten dollars. Muslin a cotton
fabric is about forty dollars to one hundred fifty dollars
per month, but that's after spending up to seven hundred
fifty dollars to buy the first batch, and without taking
into account the expense of washing, drying, and folding it.
Cheese cloth, another substitute, runs about one hundred to three

(03:33):
hundred dollars a month, but its loose fibers sometimes end
up in food, and securing it is cumbersome. On a
recent tour of Shia's kitchen, most perishable food was packed
in butcher paper or in metal trays with handwritten labels
on painter's tape indicating their contents. Instead of disposable sharpies,
they use refillable markers. The restaurant already buys rice in

(03:56):
paper bags from Korea and honey in glass jugs from
a local farm, though eliminating all incoming plastic from suppliers
is a tougher challenge that the restaurant plants to tackle
next year, says Lee. One other big adjustment wasn't as
apparent when strolling through the kitchen, a switch to a
just in time approach to food delivery and prep work
that cuts storage. Cokes whip up vinagrette on the spot

(04:19):
rather than prepping it in big batches. Instead of freezing
meat and vacuum sealed bags, they cook it fresh. Making
changes that require extra labor isn't difficult, Lee says, but
it is inconvenient. Even when he and his team found
reasonable substitutes for plastic glass containers to store staples such
as grains and dry fruit, for example, they've had to adapt.

(04:42):
Every time we reach for that container. If we drop it,
we don't just lose the ingredient. We make a huge
mess of broken glass everywhere, says Lee. Things feel a
little bit more intentional, and we do things with a
little bit more meaning. So far, SHIA staff estimates they
have avoided around two hundred thirty kilos to three hundred
and fifty kilos of plastic, or the equivalent of eleven

(05:04):
thousand to twenty thousand single use water bottles. By the
end of this year, Lee is hoping to have a
sense of how much more expensive its approach is, which
will help inform what costs might be passed on to consumers.
The restaurant currently charges one hundred eighty five dollars for
a seven course meal. Would customers be willing to come
in and pay a little bit extra for their meal?

(05:26):
Asks Lee? We think yes.