Hear the origin story of traveling restaurant Slow Burn and you’ll wonder what’s the meaning behind the name. Chefs practice zero waste through slow cooking methods, fermenting, preserving and dehydrating scraps to use as an ingredient in the next sustainable meal. The chefs founded Slow Burn after feeling frustrated with the traditional restaurant industry, from the exhausting grind to the amount of food waste.
Slow Burn will travel through California’s coast this fall and winter, then head to multiple cities in Canada. Husband-and-wife duo Andy Doubrava and Tiffani Ortiz drive to each location towing 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.”
Of their food cost, 65% goes towards what’s plated, while 35% goes toward future meals. In addition to creating new ingredients out of food scraps, they’re using waste to compost, dye merchandise and create soaps from the kitchen grease.
Unsure how guests would respond to a roaming, sustainable restaurant, Doubrava and Ortiz were surprised at the amount of tickets purchased through the 2022 – and the amount of invitations from chefs around the world.
“It’s really hard to put what we do in a box,” Ortiz told the Los Angeles Times. “I had to put ‘international food’ on our Tock page because how do you explain to people the weird s— we’re doing sometimes? It doesn’t sound good when you say that we’re fermenting rhubarb, but it’s kind of one of those things where when they’re here, they understand.”
Read more (Los Angeles Times)