Wine & Spirits - April 2020 - 8

Fi ned &
FI LT ER ED

B E Y OND GR E E N
A Brooklyn team creates a hyper-sustainable restaurant
by COREY WARREN

"It's not great for
the movement if
sustainability is so
expensive that it will
only ever be this lifestyle
affectation of the
extremely wealthy."
-Henry Rich

WINE & SPIRITS

Running a zero-waste restaurant is not intuitive, easy
or cheap. But co-owners Halley Chambers and Henry
Rich are stubborn, and the staff at Rhodora is all-in.
The space used to house Metta, a restaurant owned by
the Oberon Group, Rich's collection of carbon-neutral businesses (certified by Zero FoodPrint); those
include restaurants Rucola and June, as well as Purslane, a zero-waste caterer. When Metta closed, they
decided to build Rhodora around one idea: No catchall black bins allowed. The idea came from a February 2019 pop-up dinner in Brooklyn hosted by Silo,
a restaurant in London, where chef Douglas McMaster and his team recycle or upcycle everything: The
ceramics are made with pulverized wine bottles and
the tables are made of recycled plastic bags. They
let neighbors add to their commercial composter
because they produce so little food waste they can't
fill it themselves. McMaster calls it a "pre-industrial
food system," because he believes that excessive
waste stems from our desire for excessive choice.
Rhodora has found their choices limited, though
not as limited as one might think. Finding a cheesemonger willing to work without stickers or plastics
posed an issue, but they've settled in with Cato Corner and Miracle Springs. To keep kitchen prep simple
as they get used to their processes, they've chosen to
go with canned seafood over fresh, much of it coming from Spain and Portugal. Going abroad for nonperishables might increase their carbon footprint
but, Rich says, "We are investing in sequestration to
offset that. Having removed that variable, I want to
work with the person who has the highest integrity
in terms of how they're approaching the process."
Recently, they have been tasting samples from a
Canadian company, slightly closer to home.
When it comes to wine, Rich found an alignment

APRIL 2020

that didn't require as much effort on their part. "A
lot of natural winemakers are actually regenerative
farmers," he says. "They brought [their soils] back
to life through organic matter, which sequesters an
enormous amount of carbon because the microbial
life in the soil needs carbon to grow. The natural wine
world should talk more about how environmentally
progressive it is and not just what the wine tastes like
and how much sulfur they use." The restaurant sends
its corks to reCORK, and promotes magnums and
large-format bottles, which have less extraneous shipping weight. For the moment, the bar taps pour only
beer, but kegged wine is on their wish list.
Rich and Chambers also did away with the standard restaurant business structure, favoring an egalitarian approach. There are no managers, no cooks
and no servers. The staff greet, seat, pour, serve and
wash dishes. This way, these jacks-of-all-trades can
channel everything into its proper stream. Compostables are composted. Recyclables are recycled. It's a
radical approach of self-governance, and Rich finds
it meshes with Rhodora's overall mission. "We're voluntarily opting out of the externalization of carbon
and waste and we've taken direct responsibility for
those outputs. It feels odd in that environment to not
trust the staff." Because everybody works in both the
front- and back-of-house, everybody understands the
challenges involved with zeroing out waste and where
they're falling short. As the staff gets more comfortable operating in the system, Rich says, they'll continue to expand the menu-recently they've added a
few sandwiches and experimented with pasta dishes.
The team at Rhodora wants to build a community
of sustainably-minded people and to give them a
forum for sharing ideas. Already, they've hosted an
event with Soapply, a sustainably-minded company,

photo by Liz Clayman

"Cockles in broth?" Sam Geller asks Calla Camero. As they set up Rhodora for service,
they're brainstorming ways to sell more tins of the mollusks. The menu relies heavily
on tinned seafood because the conservas are packed in easily-recyclable metals-
an essential quality for the restaurant's über-green mission. Rhodora doesn't send
anything to a landfill.

Wine & Spirits - April 2020

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