Use Edible Scraps To Create Restaurant Family Meals

The “restaurant family meal” is a central event in many well-run restaurants.  Just before the dinner rush front of house and back of house staff gather to enjoy a well-cooked meal prepared by the chef.  The family meal is a great way to foster positive interaction and a feeling of camaraderie among your employees.  It also gives you a chance to get on the soapbox and talk about issues and work on training. During the year...

Have You Joined The NRA’s Conserve Initiative?

The National Restaurant Association’s (NRA) Conserve Initiative is designed to give restaurateurs the tools they need to start implementing sustainable, environmentally conscious practices in the food service industry.  As quoted from the Conserve Initiative’s website: “The National Restaurant Association’s Conserve...

Boulder Spotlight: The Kitchen Cafe’s Sustainable Restaurant Ethos

The Kitchen Café community bistro takes the community part of their name very seriously.  The Boulder, Colorado restaurant provides a simple, rustic setting where friends, families, and neighbors can gather to enjoy great tasting, unpretentious food and a world-class beer and wine list.  Meals can be ordered family style any day of the...

Darden Group Driving Sustainable Seafood Practices

The Darden Group, which operates both Red Lobster and Olive Garden national chain restaurants, is understandably also the largest purchaser of seafood in the...

Greener and Cheaper: Restaurants Grow Their Own Food

You’ve heard about organic ingredients.  You’ve also heard about food miles and skyrocketing food costs.  Anybody in the restaurant business can tell you these issues have affected their customer’s tastes and their...

Restaurants and Farmers Work Together To Reduce Waste and Improve Crop Yields

San Francisco's food scrap collection program benefits farmers and restaurateurs San Franciscan restaurants are participating in a city-wide compost collection program that has collected over 105,000 tons of food scraps and yard trimmings in a single year.  All that waste used to end up in...

Green Restaurant Tips: Recycling Feels Good

Unlike the tips previously offered in this series, recycling probably won’t save your restaurant or commercial kitchen money.  And recycling will probably add work to your schedule and headaches to your day.  So why recycle?  Well, there are a few very compelling reasons, and not all of them altruistic, for introducing a recycling program: Customers love it.  You’ve been reading other Going Green Tips and have started implementing...

Green Restaurant Tips: Serve Sustainable Seafood

Seafood is a wonderful delicacy that helps form the backbone of thousands of restaurants. Seafood is healthy and great tasting, and customers love treating themselves to seafood when they go out to eat. Unfortunately, overfishing has increased exponentially in the last 25 years, resulting in the collapse of a full third of the world’s fisheries. Many more are in ...