Carrot scraps, watermelon rinds, coffee grounds, bitter fruit pith and everything else you've most likely thrown into your garbage are on the menu at Slow Burn, though you'd never recognize them as such. Fermented, dehydrated or otherwise preserved, they wind up in glass jars and bottles of all shapes and sizes at chefs Andy Doubrava and Tiffani Ortiz's new roving dinner series that aims to serve sustainable meals using every last bit of every ingredient.
This fall and winter Slow Burn will blaze a trail through the Bay Area, back down the coast to pop-ups in Los Olivos, Lompoc and New Cuyama, then to a series of cities in Canada. To their car the couple will attach a trailer full of their carefully packed jars of fermented sauces, pickled produce and whatever else they've smoked and preserved, then travel from kitchen to kitchen. Whatever isn't utilized at one event will appear on the next menu, or the next — sometimes as an oil, sometimes a relish, sometimes as part of a dessert in the name of creative waste mitigation, and hopefully, building awareness and community around it.
"I feel like whatever restaurant I work in, I always end up near the dish pit in some way, and to watch half the food come back on the plate and it just goes into the garbage — it's like, there's got to be a better way to do that," said Doubrava, who recently left his post at Santa Monica's Rustic Canyon to pursue the project. "A restaurant that is good about waste [management] is still throwing out 50 pounds of food a day, easily, and it angers me and it makes me feel like I'm not doing my job right."
