Tag: restaurant

Lara Espirito Santo – Fixing food waste through extreme regenerative sourcing

30th June 2026 antonellatotaro Diet Change, Regenerative Agriculture, Role of chefs, Short Food Webs 1 Comment

Lara Espírito Santo grew up shuttling between Rio de Janeiro and her father’s industrial farms in Paraguay and Brazil, traded a planned career in politics and international development for a kitchen job at Silo in London, and went on to co-found SEM, the zero-food-waste restaurant in Lisbon she ran with her partner George McLeod until closing it ten days before this conversation (not for financial reasons, but to figure out what comes next).

Source the cream instead of buying butter, and one ingredient quietly becomes four: butter, buttermilk, then whey and cheese once you split the buttermilk again. That unglamorous bit of dairy chemistry is the mechanic behind Lara’s central claim: you don’t get to zero food waste by managing waste better. You get there by going further back up the supply chain than most kitchens ever bother to look, and only then does the creativity actually start.

In this episode, recorded in central Lisbon, with the usual scattering of planes overhead, we get into how watching the birds disappear from her father’s 20,000-hectare farm pushed her toward activism and then back into restaurants, why SEM’s food costs ran at 17%, against an industry standard of 25–30%, why she closed it anyway, the case for an EU-wide black market in regeneratively raised organ meat, oyster shells turned into dinner plates, and why she’d spend a hypothetical billion euros de-risking the years it takes a farm to convert.

Daniel Vidal – Zero-waste fine dining with deep ancestral Mexican roots

26th May 2026 antonellatotaro Regenerative Agriculture, Role of chefs 0 Comments

Daniel Vidal, head chef of Baldío, LATAM’s first zero-waste restaurant, joined Koen in the kitchen in Mexico City to talk about what it actually takes to make radical food accessible to the people it was always meant for. When Baldío won a Green Michelin Star, Daniel didn’t think to take his mother there for her birthday as the restaurant back then could win over critics but not his own community.

Daniel walks through how Baldío rebuilt its menu from the ground up shifting from a Nordic-inflected à la carte that impressed visiting chefs to a tasting menu grounded in tamales, tacos, and corn in every single dish. He explains why familiarity is the gateway drug for getting locals to try ant eggs, grasshoppers, and beef treated with koji to mimic the texture Mexicans already know from corn-fed imports. Daniel unpacks the 60-ingredient mole built almost entirely from kitchen waste — banana peel tart trimmings, English sauce offcuts, insect protein — as both a culinary feat and a zero-waste accounting exercise.

This is the third episode of a three conversations series recorded on location at Baldío, in Mexico City: farm, fermentation lab, kitchen.

Pablo Usobiaga – Zero waste and sourcing from Chinampas and smallholder farmers, building nature’s favourite restaurant in a 20 million city

9th May 2026 antonellatotaro Diet Change, Regenerative Agriculture, Role of chefs 0 Comments

An ancient farm system, built by hand on top of water, hidden inside one of the largest cities on earth and almost nobody knows it exists.

The chinampas of Xochimilco are human-made islands, constructed over centuries in the lakes that Mexico City was built on. At their peak they fed an entire civilisation. Today, more than 60% are abandoned, the city is slowly swallowing the edges, and once a chinampero stops farming, another one rarely takes their place. Pablo Usobiaga from Arca Tierra is trying to reverse that not by fighting the city, but by bringing it in through a dining experience.

This is part one of three episodes series recorded around Arca Tierra: Pablo Usobiaga built a restaurant — Baldío — around one idea: source everything from peasant farmers, waste nothing, and use fermentation to turn what would have been bin bags into the best things on the menu. It just became the first restaurant in Mexico City to earn a Green Michelin star. This conversation is where it starts: on the chinampas, where the food comes from. Parts two and three go deeper into the fermentation lab with Chris, and into the kitchen with Daniel (episodes coming out in the next weeks).

Sylvia Banda – How she trained 60,000 farmers and transformed Zambia’s food system

17th February 2026 antonellatotaro Diet Change, Farmers First Tech, Nutrient Dense Food, Regenerative Agriculture, Short Food Webs 0 Comments

A conversation with Sylvia Banda, Zambian business woman, restaurateur and social entrepreneur about her journey started when when she was 12. She opened her first food company, and she hasn’t stopped since. She now runs a multi-million-dollar business with over 15 restaurants in Lusaka, Zambia, a food- processing company selling traditional Zambian food worldwide, and has trained over 60,000 smallholder farmers to produce higher-quality products and process them to receive better prices.

We talk about why researchers should take a back seat and let farmers and entrepreneurs lead now; why the hand tools many farmers still use belong in a museum and why mechanisation is key, but with care; why processing and preserving are essential to ending hunger; and about nutrition, traditional food versus imported food, and how she taught urban people to re-appreciate what is often considered “food for the poor” that is traditional, nutrient-dense, and tasty food. To supply all of this, she set up two factories and trained over 60,000 smallholder farmers, changing many lives.

Enjoy the story and the knowledge of a true Zambian and Southern African powerhouse.

Matt Orlando – From Noma to building the world’s most circular restaurant and disrupting the chocolate industry

22nd July 2025 koenvanseijen Diet Change, Nutrient Dense Food, Regenerative Agriculture 5 Comments

A conversation with Matt Orlando, chef, entrepreneur, and former head chef at Noma. He is also the founder of Amass, one of the most circular and fully organic restaurants in the world, which closed at the end of 2022. He then focused on a project in Singapore and is now back in Denmark, currently very busy with, among other things, a new restaurant in Copenhagen.

What happens when someone who worked as a head chef in one of the best restaurants in the world, Noma, starts going deep down the rabbit hole of sustainability and responsibility? Join the fascinating journey of one of the most interesting chefs in the world, who not only redefined what a circular, sustainable restaurant means (and no, it isn’t more expensive to run, and it doesn’t require a lot of tech, etc.) but it does require a completely new mindset and way of thinking.

He shares some fascinating examples and data, like monetary savings- €17,000 in a year on water costs, for instance- which were only possible because of a mindset shift. We talk about the role of fine dining and the hospitality world in transforming the agri-food system, the role of technology, and of course, fermentation, and the VC-funded BS in food tech and fermentation.

We discuss their new restaurant concept, still very much under wraps, but exciting. And also, how they are disrupting the very dirty cacao and chocolate industry with an upcycled, fully organic, price-neutral spent brewers’ grain, which you can already find in “chocolate” cookies in the Nordics without tasting the difference.