2007-03-01 - EAT Magazine
By: Julie Pegg

Green Tables

What’s your carbon footprint?

Many Vancouver restaurants are going local, fresh and organic when it comes to the table. But are things as green behind the scenes? André LaRivière’s Green Table project is piloting the food and hospitality sectors toward more eco-responsible energy, water and waste practices.

Restaurateur Shaffeen Jamal dishes up his mad-from-scratch butter chicken and spicy curries in heat-hardy but eco-unfriendly Styrofoam containers at the popular Granville Island Rubina kiosk. That troubles Jamal.

As an alternative, Rubina launched what he calls a “Tiffin Program.” “We sell reusable ‘tiffins,’” he explains. “It’s a British/Indian term for the stainless steel lunch boxes common in India and it also refers to the meal itself We’ve made a difference one Tiffin at a time,” with an average of 30 new Tiffins purchase daily. “That’s almost 45,000 tins since we opened four and a half years ago. Still, Rubina is also responsible for 80,000 foam containers going to landfill annually. We’ve made some fine energy-efficient changes. Doing away with Styrofoam is now my biggest hurdle.”

Keen to find out how he might jump that hurdle, Jamal has joined, with eleven other food operations, the not-for-profit Green Table, piloted by food journalist and ex-CBC producer André LaRivière. The venture’s eventual goal is to “foster environmental sustainability at restaurants and food operations across the GVRD” – and beyond. The food and hospitality scales tip heavily toward eco-unfriendly practices. It generates enormous solid waste as well as energy and water usage. These sectors also contribute to greenhouse emissions (the result of having to truck in just about everything – from tomatoes to table linens). André LaRivière’s Green Table and his eco-conscious band of pioneers are taking baby steps towards more enviro-friendly running of their establishments. The plan is for these little foot prints to lead to great strides. What’s more, LaRivière is convinced these changes make good business sense.

My Dinner with André

It was lunch actually. I was early for my meeting with André LaRivière on a torrentially wet Friday at the Rocky Mountain Flatbread Company (RFMC), one of the leading participants in Green Table. Owners Dominic and Suzanne Fielden greeted me warmly and gave me a brief rundown on RFMC “2.” (There is another RFMC in Canmore, Alberta.) The place is already pretty verdant. Reclaimed materials were used in the makeover of the former Bread Garden Café; food ingredients are fresh, organic and local-when-possible. Now the couple are keen to make the kitchen as eco-efficient as they can, and they’ve enlisted Green Table to help.

Enter André. Ii notice he’s clutching a clipboard.

We hunker down at a rustic, recycled wood table near the pizza oven and between bites of superb, crispy-crust pizza, André relates what spurred him to launch Green Table. “I was already involved in the organic movement. I wrote my ‘Conscientious Kitchen’ column for the Georgia Straight and sat on the board for FarmFolk/CityFolk. But it was a conference in Santa Rosa that fuelled the idea for Green Table. I listened to Marin County ‘bioneers’ cheer each other on for three days toward sustainable environmental practices.” Larry Bain, a food activist, impressed LaRivière with the greening of his upscale L Jardinière restaurant in San Francisco. So too did Ritu Primlani, founder of Thimakka, a program that steers ethnic restaurants around the San Francisco Bay area towards eco-friendliness. LaRivière has barely paused for breath or a nibble. “It hit me,” he says, fixing me with a gaze from beneath his navy beret. “We need to do this in Vancouver.” So he set about adapting the SF program for GVRD restaurants, swapping his media gig for an eco-energy-conscious project and calling it Green Table.

La Rivière’s clipboard clasps 12 pages of very tiny print for a “Green Audit.” He captures, within a light-bulb filament, the amount of energy, solid waste and other eco-sensitive bugs that are endemic in running a restaurant (establishments earn “points” for each positive enviro step they take.) “The first thing André did when he walked through the door with his clipboard was snap on the light switch,” laughs Suzanne Fielden. “He tracked how much energy we use, then our water and the amount of refuse we rack up. We really appreciated his efforts. We simply hadn’t the time to monitor this closely. All our time was taken up running the restaurant, seeing to our three kids and operating our school programs.” (The couple hold health-but-fun kids’ cooking classes in the commissary-style kitchen. They are booked solid.)

Dominic pipes in. “It was an eye-opener seeing our operation through André’s lens. We were using less caustic cleaners. But the staff, and us, were flipping on lights and fans before they were needed. And the dishwasher hose sprayed three gallons of water per minute. Now when we arrive for work, we turn on only necessary light. The fan goes on when the range goes on. Fifty dollars bought a low-spray nozzle for the dishwasher. Dishes are pre-soaked in bins. We also switched to black aprons. They need replacing less frequently than white aprons,, which show more stains and become grey and dingy.” With a minimal outlay and a few changes in habit, the RMFC is not only eco-friendlier but more cost-effective as well.

Players on the Green
I was able to talk to five of the 12 food operations’ chefs/owners/managers who pretty much cut across all types of food services in the GVRD. First up was a brief chat with Graham Currie, senior business administrator of GVRD Business and Community Services – Policy and Planning. Currie told me that Green Table fits nicely into GVRD’s SmartStepsTM program, whose eco-efficiency philosophy is “creating more goods and services with ever less use of resources, waste and pollution. La Rivière and I agree,” says Currie “that it is in the region’s best interest to develop an infrastructure that helps prevent having to search for new reservoirs and landfills that costs the community dearly.” Currie worked closely with LaRivière in customizing his auditing process.

Vancouver’s Raincity Grill, a shining star in the local, fresh and organic firmament, also recycles scraps for fertilizer and has a composting program. Cooking oil is reprocessed for bio-diesel fuel. And when the time comes, Raincity’s appliances will be upgraded to more eco-efficient models. Brent Hayman, general manager and sommerlier, admits he had a bit of an issue getting the staff to recycle. Now, he says, “attitudes are changing since we are aware of how environmentally unfriendly waste can be.” Hayman also hopes that local and provincial governments will give some sort of financial nod to restaurants using safe environmental practices. A Green Table certification should help. “After all, if we are spending less, then I think we deserve a bit of a tax break or rebate.”

Don Letendre, executive chef at Opus Hotel’s Elixir, echoes Hayman’s expectations. “Through clear steps and stages in improving energy efficiency, I trust governments will buy into our efforts.” Top-notch ingredients plus top-notch kitchen staff equals less food trim. But measuring energy and water is more difficult because Opus is both a hotel and a restaurant. “For instance, there are two hot water tanks – one each for the restaurant and hotel. On occasion one draws from the other.” But LaRivière, with Opus’s head engineer, audited every meter vis-à-vis water usage, gas and hydro to see how they could use less. Letendre says it will be a challenge to trickle the bio-message throughout Opus/Elixir due to the staff shift requirements in even a small hotel. But he’s hell-bent on trying if it leads to a more eco- and economically efficient business.

Wild Rice, a small contemporary Asian eatery, and the 16-soon-to-be-19-member Cactus club chain have made significant strides toward greening their establishments. Wild Rice owner/operator Andrew Wong and Cactus Club exec chef Julian Bond are thrilled with their staff “buy-in” for eco-efficiency. Says Song: “Our bunch started self-policing thanks to a server, Belinda [who now “ecos” at Brasserie L’Ècole in Victoria]. She would give a good elbow to someone who did not sort stuff in the waste bins.” Wong says his staff members bring reusable containers to work for their food “to go.” One is saving light bulbs. “What are you gonna do with those?” a fellow employee asked. “Dunno. But I’m sure going to find out.” It seems he’d heard about a process of making opaque bricks from broken glass. At the Cactus Club, in-house training is strict, but the mostly young workers seem not to mind. They all function as a team toward the restaurants’ efforts toward eco-sensitivity. They have fun bidding eBay style on furniture and fixtures when the chain renovates. Recently, one fellow bought a few $400 barstools for fifty bucks each. The outfit has installed energy-saving automatic light systems and timers on oven hoods. Back at Wild Rice, Wong buys his lovely glass plates from a Granville Island artisan.

Shaffeen Jamal, too, scored tops on the LaRivière clipboard checklist. At the moment, he is testing a new biodegradable plate and clamshell container that LaRivière is circulating among takeaway eateries. Rubina’s hot water tank is nearing five years of age. Jamal will update with an on-demand system. He and the other 11 food operators have high aspirations. They hope Greren Tables’ philosophy and practices will percolate through all food and food-related industries – and even to customers. For Jamal, that means starting with the Granville Island Food Court.

“Some day we’ll all look back and refer to Styrofoam as a curse word.” Jamal smiles, “I hope I’m around to witness it.”