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Sustainability is still often treated as a trend in the restaurant world, even as the planet is undeniably suffering, and as climate-induced floods, wildfires and extreme events become increasingly normal. While producers from wine to seafood are seeking ways to move past sustainable into the realm of being regenerative, the restaurant industry in both the US and Canada ought to be racing to catch up.
They simply are not. It’s too easy to order industrially sourced ingredients from large corporations. It’s too easy to buy the proteins and fish that are the most popular among consumers. On the heels of the Covid pandemic, restaurants are still struggling to attract customers and manage rising labour costs.
In an effort to tackle two urgent issues at once – maximising the ingredients that come through the door (in order to better manage restaurant finances) and minimising one’s impact on the environment while paving the way for a more viable future, two restaurants, on different sides of North America, are striving to work as locally and sustainably as possible and have the gentlest impacts: Calgary’s River Café and Washington, D.C.’s Oyster Oyster.
“For me it’s a mindset. Sustainability becomes a decision-making tool, a lens through which you see the world,” says the former’s founder and proprietor Sal Howell. “We were not a sustainable restaurant from day one, we evolved.”
Most of the things they do are shockingly simple
River Café. Right photo: Pauline Yu
No crying over spilt beer
In 1991, River Café was merely a seasonal park concession on Calgary’s Prince’s Island. Four years later it evolved into a year-round establishment and has continued to develop into one of the region’s most prominent fine-dining restaurants, celebrating local abundance in continually revolutionary ways, under Howell’s guidance. These ways are often astoundingly simple and obvious. “We were looking at this years ago from a cost perspective – why does our beer cost fluctuate? Now, to find acidity we have a very elaborate vinegar program. When you tap a beer, there’s also foam runoff, which we collect! Whenever we tap a beer, we make vinegar from it. The bartenders collect the foam, it settles down and is of course, then beer and we turn that into vinegar,” says Howell.
“To our beer runoff, we add a vinegar mother, and in a few weeks, we have beer vinegar which we’re using in our charred cabbage and barley risotto,” elaborates Scott MacKenzie, who has been River Café’s Executive Chef since March 2021.
Oyster Oyster’s chef Rob Rubba also leans heavily into vinegar as a provider of acidic flavours without using citrus (difficult to grow in both Alberta and the Mid-Atlantic). You won’t find lemons or limes on Oyster Oyster’s strictly seasonal menu, but rather vinegar made from local ingredients. This feeds into the notion that menu development involves the “exploration of a single ingredient.” “How many ways can we use it?” asks Rubba.
The Oyster Oyster team
Championing where you are and the ghost of black pepper
Thinking back to when River Café was in its infancy, Howell reflects, “It felt like food came from everywhere else except for the farms around our regions. We forged pathways and relationships in rural farmers’ markets. It was a lot of work. It felt like back then we should be championing where we are instead of trying to be a theme of a restaurant. Back then people would ask you what kind of restaurant it was, and the categories were very narrow.” River Café became part of a bigger movement in Canada and worldwide.
“We chip away at things – why are we using black pepper? We have Canadian grown green alder and dried Espelette chilli pepper. It has a little bit of the crunch. It’s not a substitute. No one would mistake it for black pepper, and I think it really delights people. It fills the need of when you want the crack of black pepper on,” says Howell.
Candles can start it all
“When we first opened, we weren’t using an oyster recovery program for our shells because our counts were too low for pick-ups, so we were finding new ways to deal with the shells. We also wanted votives on the table for candles and we had some amount of oil leftover from shallow frying,” says Rubba. Oyster Oyster started making their own votives from oyster shells, leftover oil and local beeswax. They’ve since reused those same initial shells countless times and regularly receive photos from guests who have taken that idea and made their own oyster shell votives at home.
A dish at Oyster Oyster; chef Rob Rubba
Building cuisine around not using plastic
There are new challenges, brought on by the pandemic, when it comes to plastic – a lot more PPE being discarded, for instance. Howell calls it “an explosion of garbage.” “I like going to places [to eat] and then not being covered in plastic,” says Rubba, who creatively reuses containers. He sees his process at Oyster Oyster as “building cuisine around not using plastic – rather than taking something away.” There are no single use piping bags, sous vide bags or cling film at Oyster Oyster.
Stewarding waste
“We make all of our charcuterie in-house and we take our charcuterie trim and make a paste and add to Chinese-style XO sauce,” says MacKenzie. “We think of a dish through and through before it goes on the menu and find use for all the trim. Instead of thinking of one dish think of [all the ways] you can use its ingredients.” Howell speaks of stewarding the waste that both exits River Café and farms before it gets to her restaurant. “When there was thinning of the crops, farmers were discarding them, and we were like we’ll take those these are fantastic!” At Oyster Oyster, both food and water are coveted. Leftover filtered water at the end of the night is used to water the many plants in the dining room, which in turn, clean the air.
River Café. Right photo: Pauline Yu
Chefs set trends
Diners are more likely to consume an unfamiliar fish, vinegar, a thinned beet, whatever – when it is presented on a menu. “Who would champion our local food system better than a restaurant who could buy them and transform them to their audience?” asks Howell. Chefs thus break down barriers of consumption, creating space for the things we should be eating.
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