restaurant

The Conflict Kitchen

- Adam Clare

Conflict Kitchen is a take-out restaurant that serves cuisine only from countries with which the USA is in conflict. It’s located in Pittsburg and founded/operated by artists and chefs to humanize the international conflicts that the USA engages in around the world. It functions as a space to get food and a space to expand one’s understanding of the world around them.

“In contrast to the polarizing effect of broadcast media, we’ve sought to create a platform which can support a more subtle exchange of culture and politics,” notes Dawn Weleski, a multidisciplinary artist wiht a performance bent, who co-founded the project with Jon Rubin and John Peña. “With food as a mediator, it becomes easier for customers to consider the everyday life of people — they become responsive in a different way and consider more nuanced perspectives. They start to consider the people and culture behind conflicts [that are conducted] at a government or military level.”

Read more at Design Observer.
Conflict Kitchen’s website.
Thanks to Trevor!

Jon Bon Jovi Starts a PWYC Restaurant to Help People

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Jon Bon Jovi has opened a restaurant that uses the pay what you can (PWYC) system to help Americans who are unable to purchase the most basic of necessitates: food.

Jon Bon Jovi Soul Kitchen from JBJ Soul Kitchen on Vimeo.

BoingBoing sums it up:

Soul Kitchen is a new restaurant opened in Red Bank, New Jersey, by Jon Bon Jovi and his wife, Dorothea. The establishment offers a “pay what you can afford” payment model, and serves wholesome, gourmet food made with fresh ingredients grown in the restaurant’s garden, and other local produce.

On the website, they explain that Soul Kitchen is “A community restaurant with no prices on the menu; customers donate to pay for their meal. If you are unable to donate you may do volunteer work in exchange for your family’s meal.”

Seattle Law Makes Restaurants Waste Less

- Adam Clare

Seattle has become the first place in North America to require restaurants to use compostable or recyclable items that are meant for only one use.

Put into effect July 1, the ordinance requires restaurants, coffee shops, food courts, cafeterias and other food service businesses to stop throwing away single-use food-service ware and packaging including napkins, paper bags, wooden coffee stir sticks, clamshells and hot and cold beverage cups and lids among others.
…

“With our requirement that food service packaging must be compostable or recyclable, Seattle has taken a big step toward a zero waste future,” said City Councilmember Mike O’Brien. “You have to ask yourself why we should make stuff just to throw it away. With compostable and recyclable food containers, we’re closing the loop.”

Keep reading at Earth 911.

C’est What? Vegetable Oil!

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

A restaurant in downtown Toronto has converted their deep fryer into a more efficient model and use the waste oil from the fryer to fuel a car. Neat!

Since installing the new deep fryer in late January, Broughton says his vegetable oil use has been cut in half and the amount of gas to run the fryer has been drastically reduced.

“The fryer is supposed to use 40 per cent less gas, but we’re still assessing exactly how much we’re saving. Just from the lower vegetable oil use, I’m saving $80 a week, about $4,000 a year. My waste used to be about 100, 110 litres a week. Now it’s about 50 litres a week. Angelo now takes pretty much all of our used oil for his car.”

Rigitano says the only problem he has had so far with the car is when he took it to be serviced.

“My mechanic started laughing. He said, ‘I’m getting hungry.’ ”

Fact: According to Natural Resources Canada, North Americans produce 5 to 6 kg per person of trap grease removed from commercial cooking operations each year and another 3 to 5 kg of cleaner used cooking oils. Converting this could produce almost 2.5 billion litres of clean diesel a year, worth about $2 billion.

Read the full article at The Star.

Thanks Kathryn!

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