The other night, as I ate a salad at Blue Hill, in the West Village, a server approached my table with an iPad. “Have you seen this?" she asked. "Chef wanted you to see this.” By “Chef,” she meant Dan Barber, the man behind Blue Hill and Blue Hill Stone Barns, a sister restaurant and farm upstate. By “this,” she meant a photograph of a dumpster, into which a chute was depositing an enormous quantity of multi-colored scraps of fruit and vegetables—the runoff from a commercial food processor. The experience felt something similar to being shown a picture of what would happen to a sad-eyed old horse if you didn’t save it from the glue factory. Sitting in a small, enamel casserole dish in front of me were fruit and vegetable scraps that Barber had rescued, just like the ones in the photo. Arranged in an artful tangle, bits of carrot, apple, and pear were dressed with a creamy green emulsion, studded with pistachios, and garnished with a foamy pouf that turned out to be the liquid from canned chickpeas, whipped into haute cuisine.
A parsnip head in a shallow dish of water, its tall greens splayed elegantly, served as a strangely beautiful centerpiece for the table. Beside it, a candle flickered in a small glass pitcher, labelled with a piece of masking tape on which someone had written “beef”: instead of wax, the melted liquid was beef tallow, or rendered fat, to be poured onto a plate just as several slices of a dark, musky bread, made with grain left over from beer-brewing, arrived to dip in it.
This was the opening night of Barber’s first-ever pop-up, which will close out its two-week run on Tuesday. Until then, Blue Hill’s understatedly elegant dining room will remain nearly unrecognizable, dressed up—or down, really—as a new restaurant called wastED. Formless Finder, an architecture firm that specializes in recycled materials, has covered the walls in an industrial-looking fabric known as “row cover,” which is used on farms to protect crops from cold, wind, and pests. The normal tabletops have been replaced by slabs of mycelium, the all-natural and biodegradable plastics substitute that Ian Frazier wrote about for this magazine in 2013. On that first evening, even the playlist was reused: over the course of the meal, I heard Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” three times.
Most importantly, each of the dishes on the menu—priced at fifteen dollars, regardless of size or ingredients—is made from edible things that most people would consider trash, and much of which would have been otherwise thrown away: broken razor clams, beet roots, cheese whey. “The amazing thing about this project,” Barber told me a few days later, standing in the kitchen as the first orders of the night were being prepared and plated, “is that everything on this menu is done in restaurants. These aren’t new ideas. This is the seventeen-dollar ravioli from yesterday’s greens or braised meat, mixed with cheese.” Using whatever happens to be lying around, Barber said, is something that chefs do all the time, including the big names—Grant Achatz, Dominique Ansel, April Bloomfield—that he’d invited to devise nightly specials.
The difference with wastED is that the menu tells the truth in the plainest terms. “Cured cuts of waste-fed pig” are served with “reject carrot mustard, off-grade sweet potatoes, melba toast from yesterday’s oatmeal.” “Dry-aged beef ends broth” features “malt rootlets, mystery vegetables and peels” and “cow corn crackers.” A glossary elaborates when necessary: off-grade, it explains, means “below a commercially recognized standard of quality.” (“Farmers, processors and retailers,” it went on, “often discard produce if it does not meet certain aesthetic specifications.”) Dry-aged beef ends are “the hard exterior layers of dry-aged beef.”
If part of the allure of eating at restaurants is the magic of something that looks and tastes delicious appearing, as if effortlessly, in front of you, what happens when you’re forced to see how the sausage is made? That answer depends on the diner, of course. I was perhaps unusually primed to enjoy wastED, because my father, whose mother grew up in Depression-era Brooklyn, is the type of person who eats apple cores and thinks that expiration dates are Big Food conspiracies. He shops in the section of his local grocery store where overripe produce is sold at a discount and tagged with stickers reading, “Not the Best, But Still a Good Buy.” If a brick of cheese grows moldy, he scrapes off the mold. If milk has undeniably soured, why not use it in pancake batter? Anything truly unusable goes into the compost, to be reincarnated as summer sunflowers in the backyard. Over the course of my life, I have tried to shed some of this thinly-veiled neuroticism, but I still wince every time I toss a handful of kale stems in the trash rather than pickling them or keeping them in the freezer for future stock-making.
And so Barber, it’s fair to say, was speaking my language, scratching a deep-seated itch. Still, the food tended to transcend its origin story. The cured cuts of waste-fed pig turned out be a salumi plate—slightly more rustic-looking than what’s served at trendy Manhattan restaurants, but no less delicious. The dry-aged-beef-ends broth was “brodo” by another name: concentrated, rich, and flavorful. Peppery pasta trimmings looked pretty much like any other handmade noodles, elevated by supple ribbons of preserved monkfish tripe, which was convincing as an exotic delicacy. I couldn’t help but notice that the scrap-salad tasted literally (if only faintly, and not unpleasantly) of the kitchen sink—specifically, the vegetal, overripe scent of what gathers in the drain after a home-cooked meal—but I finished it with gusto. A dish called “dog food,” with “unfit potatoes and gravy”—made with offal and meat from a cow bred exclusively for milking, and served on a silver platter that looked like the sort of dishware that a billionaire in her eighties might use to feed her shih tzu—was nothing more than a slice of excellent meatloaf.
Some dishes were notably weirder, and harder to eat. Accessing the buttery meat clinging to the rack of black cod—essentially a fish spine, left over after smoked sable has been fileted for Sunday morning bagels—required surgical concentration, though no more, perhaps, than does eating a lobster. Fried monkfish “wings” (from the bones attached to the fins) successfully emulated their chicken counterparts, to a point. They were brined in olive juice, thickly battered, and served in a Nashville-style basket with a little squirt bottle of hot sauce, made with peppers from a vegetable-breeding lab. But each wing retained a set of slightly terrifying spikes that I couldn’t help imagine were teeth.
And yet, when I tried the monkfish wings again, on a second visit, I found that the spikes didn’t bother me, and the meat, I noticed, was juicier than even the best fried chicken. Ordering horrible-sounding things that turned out to be delicious was a bizarre but exhilarating adventure. In the kitchen, Barber mentioned that he’d been asked repeatedly, in conversations about wastED (the capitalization signifies “education”), what he saw as the project’s purpose. “If there’s an endgame, it’s how does this stuff get bumped up?" he said. "Is this what sushi was when you and I were growing up? Lobster, maybe seventy years ago, was fed to prisoners. Actually, there was a law that said you couldn’t feed lobster meat more than once a week to prisoners, because it was inhumane.”
The inspiration for wastED, Barber argues, was as much cultural as it was political. “I didn’t want this to be about, like, Americans waste too much, we’re such a wasteful society,” he told me. The statistics are bleak: thirty-three million tons of food end up in American landfills every year. We throw away forty per cent of our food. To Barber, this is perfectly understandable. “I know I’m wasteful, but part of the American experience is waste,” he said. “Our country’s been so fertile. You’ve got so much abundance. That’s not our fault. That was agriculture. Our soil was the best in the world. Virgin soil, temperate rain climates—it’s like, shit, the Garden of Eden. No wonder we eat high on the hog, we have so much hog!”
Barber is interested in preserving that abundance, of course. Taking a hard look at what we’re not using, and figuring out ways to make it desirable might not only stave off our inevitable losses, as the population grows and the climate crisis worsens, it will also come in handy when we’re forced to be more resourceful. But it’s about “really good cooking,” too, he said, which has, historically, involved utilizing things that aren’t obviously appealing, out of economic necessity. If restrictions are the catalysts of creativity, when it comes to cuisine, America, Barber thinks, has had too few. “We never devoted ourselves to a cuisine, because we weren’t forced to do that. Cuisines are forced. And the result is beautiful.”
His idea is to effectively reverse-engineer the evolution of American food. “Skate-wing cartilage,” he said—referring to a WastED dish in which it’s fried and served with a fish-head tartar sauce, the essence of fish and chips—“is a little out there. But barley and buckwheat”—which are often grown as rotation crops, to prime the soil for more desirable grains—“aren’t, and those mostly goes to bag feed, because there’s no market for them. Rye is another one. We don’t eat rye in this country. That was a staple, and delicious. That’s not really pushing the envelope and I think we should be talking about that more. Chefs would love to sell that.”
Of course, it’s not as though, if Barber could somehow turn immature eggs (“unlaid eggs that are sometimes discovered in the oviducts of slaughtered laying hens”) or coffee-bean husks into the next sushi or lobster, the problem of food waste would be solved, or even dented. As one food comes into fashion, another tends to fall out. But asking people to confront their food biases—to expand their culinary imaginations in the way that chefs and the citizens of less abundant societies do every day—seems like a worthy exercise. At the very least, it makes for more interesting menus. I can’t think of a recent dessert I’ve enjoyed more than Barber’s charred pineapple core, draped with candied mango skin, and bumped up to greatness by a scoop of ethereal lime-leaf ice cream. Not a bite went wasted.
