Life for Leftovers Extra food can help the less fortunate, educate staff, feed bears, or return to the earth. By Susan Bard Hall
LIBRARY BISTRO, ALEXIS HOTEL Seattle
Tiffany Layco, Executive Chef
“Amazingly, we do not have much food left over. I try to control waste and not over-produce. When one group didn’t take more than half its food that had not been touched by guests, we made it into sack lunches to give to the Women & Children’s Shelter. We selected the shelter because we already support it by going over monthly to help cook and serve. Also, the Library Bistro is part of a composting program (as are all Kimpton properties). We compost any ‘waste’ food products we have to dispose of. Everything is full-circle and returns to the earth. Again, in maintaining a low-waste mentality, what we cannot share in donations we ‘reuse’ through our composting program. Composting is taken very seriously here and throughout the rest of the restaurant community.”
CONRAD CHICAGO Chicago
Baasim Zafar, Executive Chef
“I use leftovers as an educational tool. Our staff must be educated on the food in order to respond to guest questions. We give leftover food to our servers so they’re able to taste it and learn about it. Because we’re a smaller operation, the highest number we’ll do for an event is 175, so there is never a tremendous amount of waste. If we do a banquet for 100, per our contract we do three percent overset. The average comes in at 95, so we’ll have eight leftovers. Also, we’ll do two or three vegetarian plates, plus a few with no sauce. So for 100 people, the average is 10 leftovers. If we have more, then we’ll invite sales and front desk to taste as well.”
OMNI INTERLOCKEN RESORT Broomfield, Colorado
David Jurcak, General Manager
“The Omni Interlocken Resort donates leftover food scraps to the Rocky Mountain Wildlife Conservation Center, and they go directly to feed rescued bears—mostly black bears, but some brown bears (other animals can’t eat scraps). I cannot stress enough that these are scraps—we are scraping the plates. It is nothing that could ever go to a food bank to feed a human. My wife is a volunteer at the Center, and she comes to the hotel and picks up the scraps, which we freeze first. We call them Bear Popsicles. Then she takes them over in our truck. Our goal is to achieve zero waste. This reduces our pools and dumpsters and saves money at the end of the day. We hope our actions encourage other hotels to think about similar kinds of donations.”
MARRIOTT RENAISSANCE ASHEVILLE HOTEL Asheville, North Carolina
Charles Moore, Director of F&B
“A key to keeping my job is not having too much excess food, and I work closely with our director of catering and banquet manager. One approach is to have everyone sitting down eating and have full buffet pans; another is to have everyone sitting down eating and have empty buffet pans. We have good guarantees and guests show up, so we generally don’t have too much left over. We know our banquet menus well in advance, so we’ll make one or two of the same entrées for our staff cafeteria. Banquet leftovers are added to the cafeteria offerings. Seldom do we have leftovers that go off property. We do donate time and money to local food banks and partner with Rotary for the holidays.”
