The Most Exciting Food at Restaurants Starts in the Trash Bin

Last fall, in a dimly-lit dining room in Sydney, I tried a macaron made with the eyes of a Nannygai, an Australian red fish. It was delicately crisp with a silky center, served at the finale of a dinner at Saint Peter, the acclaimed seafood restaurant from Josh Niland, the chef perhaps most well known for pushing the limits of what’s possible (and edible, and shockingly delicious) with whole fish. Each dish of the nine-course menu — from the minestrone with noodles made from fish bones to a charcuterie plate featuring cod chorizo and John Dory liver pâté — underscored his singular focus on seafood innovation. 

The pioneering chef and his team dry process the seafood at their dedicated fish butchery, which allows them to use upwards of 90% of the fish, compared to the between 45% and 55% yield in traditional breakdown methods. It’s part of the restaurant’s no waste approach to their ethically-caught seafood. With all of the hurdles facing restaurants in 2025, from rising food costs to labor challenges, being mindful of waste “dictates the menu completely,” he says. Niland is one of a growing number of chefs rethinking kitchen waste to boost sustainability, cut costs, and increasingly, to drive culinary innovation.

The chef, who opened Saint Peter in 2016, started by putting trays on top of garbage cans in the kitchen to stop himself and his cooks from mindlessly throwing away what they first thought was waste. It was a decision born out of trying to solve a problem: “Our produce is incredibly expensive and finite,” Niland says. “Without the right disciplines or butchery matrix in place to cut fish, then it impacts the restaurant significantly financially.”

But what started as an economic and ethical approach “became a creative obsession,” he says. The fish eye macarons were sparked by discovering a collagen-rich element while researching the components of an eye in an optometrist’s textbook. And transforming fish bones into noodles is a trick Niland picked up from chef Matt Orlando, who developed it during his tenure at his now-closed Copenhagen restaurant Amass — the bones are pressure-cooked until they soften and can be blended into a paste, which is combined with ingredients like tapioca starch or rice flour.

“This technique was a huge unlock in terms of its use, first as a pasta or noodle dough, but it also gave way to a long list of other applications from tiramisu, to shortbread and brioche,” Niland says. “We continue to only scratch the surface of its potential.”

This waste-conscious philosophy is gaining traction worldwide. In Thailand, 2020 was a turning point for Jaras, when the Michelin-listed fine dining restaurant inside the InterContinental Phuket transitioned into full sustainable operations. This included working with WWF Thailand to research invasive species, connecting with small farmers to source underutilized produce, and employing a zero waste strategy for its nine-course sustainable gastronomy menu.

“Rather than viewing zero waste as a limitation, we see it as a tool that consistently challenges both us and producers to develop innovative ways of producing, sourcing, cooking, and serving exceptional food,” says the restaurant’s executive chef Marco Turatti. 

One dish that highlights the approach is the Blackchin Tilapia Khanom Jeen noodle. The meat of the fish, an invasive species in the region, is used to make the Khanom Jeen noodles, while the head and bones are grilled until dry and turned into fish powder to season the noodles and boost the flavor of the curry sauce. The skin and scales are crisped to add texture to the dish.

Visionary restaurants are also incorporating waste elimination into their DNA. Vespertine in Los Angeles also takes a holistic approach to the menu, starting with no trash cans in the kitchen. The avant-garde restaurant, helmed by 2017 F&W Best New Chef Jordan Kahn, meets the goal by using ingredients between its food and beverage programs.

One example on the current menu at Verpertine: locally grown passion fruit is divided into skin, juice, and seeds. The juice is reduced to a thick molasses and brushed onto the scallops, the skin is infused into an oil for razor clam mousse in a different course, and the seeds are steeped into a kombucha, the non-alcoholic pairing for the scallop course. No component goes unused, creating a thread of flavor that winds through multiple courses.

Taking a more scientific approach to reducing waste, Shia in Washington, D.C.’s Union Market neighborhood opened last fall. The Korean fine dining restaurant helmed by chef Edward Lee is a non-profit that’s also designed to be a research hub, collaborating with academic institutions to develop and share sustainable solutions for the hospitality industry. Its goals include implementing zero plastic and zero gas operations, and also reducing waste. So at the restaurant, the staff dehydrates greens and herbs, grating them into a powder that gets mixed with dried seaweed to flavor hand cut noodles and enhance cocktails. 

But they’re also using the dehydrator to test out a broader use case. “More than 60% of what goes into our trash bins is moisture,” the chef says. “If we can remove the moisture from our trash, we reduce our waste significantly.” They’re currently experimenting with how to safely dehydrate spent products so they can either be composted or disposed of with less volume.

“Restaurants can always lead the way and be part of the solution rather than be the source of the problem,” Lee says. “By its very definition, as a restaurant, we require taking from the land and oceans for our necessary ingredients, so it is important that we give back as well.”