The drive to minimize waste in hotels’ F&B operations takes many forms – among them recent bans on plastic straws, efforts to streamline buffets and creative recipe reboots to use more of a particular ingredient – where does cutting water use fit? Amy Cavanaugh of HOTELS sister publication Plate, which covers the chef industry and food trends, found out. (This story originally ran on Plateonline.com.)
Drives to eliminate plastic straws from the waste stream has helped shine a light on the less environmentally sound practices of bar programs. But whether or not to use straws is not the only issue that bartenders face. For Denver bartender Ky Belk, it was water waste that made him reconsider how he was using ice at the bar programs for the Edible Beats restaurant group, which includes Linger and El Five.
“I always say it’s weird to ask bartenders to be sensitive to how much ice they use, because it’s like our medium — it’s like asking a chef to be more conscientious with their natural gas usage,” he says. But Belk asked that question and started by looking at the Five Spice Old Fashioned, which is on the menu at Linger.
“To make an Old Fashioned classically, you’ve got your stirring glass that you load up with ice, then you put your whiskey, sugar and bitters in it,” he says. “You stir it. Then you strain it into a big double Old Fashioned glass over a big whiskey rock, and the stirring ice goes in the dump sink.”
The large single cube is a standard way to serve an Old Fashioned, but Belk says he estimated that between a third to a half of the cube came back to the bar in the empty glass because it’s designed to melt slowly. “That also goes into the dump sink,” he says.
Belk estimated that between the two types of ice, the bar was wasting 800 liters of water a month making the single drink.
“That’s not accounting for the fact that the end of the night, or periodically through the evening, you have to run hot water over that dump sink to melt all the ice that’s accumulated in there or even the relative inefficiency of ice machines,” he says.
Belk says he figured out how much water was being wasted at Linger to serve this single drink shortly before the restaurant group opened El Five, and the process of reviewing that drink made him think about ways to reduce water waste at the new restaurant. For the Old Fashioned and other stirred drinks made at the El Five service bar, he takes a page from the now-closed White Lyan in London, where drinks were pre-batched and pre-diluted, then held in a cooler.
“When it’s time for them to go out, you can just pour the right amount over the large rock in the cold glass,” he says, noting that he hasn’t eliminated the large cube for the presentation and stirs the drink as usual at the bar. “In terms of stirred drinks, I still think the theater is important for the guests at the bar. They want to see all the stuff.”
It isn’t just stirred drinks that Belk reworked. He also thought about how to rejigger “two-ice drinks.”
“That’s something like a margarita or a Tom Collins that you shake over a shaker full of ice and then you strain over fresh ice,” he says. “I wanted to either eliminate or minimize the presence of those kinds of drinks on the physical menu.”
He started by looking at the margarita to figure out how to make the drink without shaking it with ice. Belk has a spindle blender at El Five, and tested it by adding tequila, lime juice, agave nectar and crushed ice to the blender.
“It aerates it, chills it, gives it a little bit of dilution, and then we serve over another glass full of crushed ice,” he says. “So, it isn’t exactly frozen, but it isn’t really rocks. And there’s no wasted ice.”
He does the same thing with the pineapple mint Collins, but uses less ice and serves it over cubed ice.
While Belk can’t quantify the water and cost savings at El Five, since it’s a new bar, he says that “at the end of every shift, there’s very little ice in any of my dump sinks compared to traditional bars, so I know I’m making an impact. I know it’s working.”