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Why NYC restaurants are playing coy about sustainability
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Samantha Dady
Published Oct 26, 2026 at 10:01 a.m. ET
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Chris Coe
By
Samantha Dady
Published Oct 26, 2026 at 10:01 a.m. ET
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The cocktail descriptions on Golden Ratio's drinks menu read a little like a dictionary — cascara, terpene, oxidative — though they're meant to be navigated by mood. Translation: You don’t necessarily need to know what ingredients like nasturtium or piel de sapo are, you just need to decide whether your vibe that night is “bright” or “fruity,” “spirituous” or “structured.”
When I found myself at this cocktail bar in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, on a recent Saturday night, the first chill of fall was settling in the air, and I was craving something fruity to savor summer just a little longer. The Green Strawberry spoke to me. The candy-red cocktail, served in a simple glass coupe, resembled the ripest version of its name. Its smell evoked the sweetness of the berry mid-summer. Its taste was true to its menu description, “grassy,” and lacked the familiar tang of Tanqueray or Tito’s.
You won’t find any big alcohol brands in your drink at Golden Ratio. The bar partners with local distillers to create exclusive base spirits for their cocktails and nonalcoholic beverages. Inspired by what they say are 52 distinct micro-seasons and a desire to run their establishment sustainably, Golden Ratio’s beverage program aims to capture plants as they root, flower and ripen — and before they reach the landfill.
Through its partnership with Brooklyn-based distillery Acid Spirits, Golden Ratio creates custom liquor from ingredients that might otherwise have been scrapped. Rather than toss run-of-the-mill kitchen byproducts like lemon peels, olive brine and stale bread, restaurants save them for the Prospect Heights distillery. There, the ingredients undergo vacuum distillation, a process that delicately preserves even the faintest of flavors and results in a neutral-grain spirit that stands in for other clear alcohols, like vodka and gin, in Golden Ratio’s cocktails.
As Piper Kristensen, Golden Ratio’s beverage director, remarked, “the simple law of distilling is that if you can smell it, you can distill it.” He trains the team at this bar, and the other spaces Redwood Hospitality owns, including beloved restaurant and wine bar Place des Fêtes, to think — and smell — before putting anything in the garbage.
Golden Ratio doesn’t exactly advertise its beverage program as sustainable; the menu doesn’t boast of the poundage of food waste diverted from the landfill. “I don’t think that opening with your commitment to sustainability is a very fun and sexy thing to do,” Kristensen said.
Seeing sustainability as something that might potentially take away from, instead of add to, a diner’s experience, illustrates a broader shift in New York City restaurants. The old model of sustainability, where farm-to-table menus and rustic-chic interiors drew customers in, is out. In its place is a more understated approach. Sustainability may be at the heart of how a kitchen operates but not in how it markets itself. In an industry shaped by rising operating costs and ever-shifting consumer taste, what’s motivating restaurants to continue to invest in “quiet” sustainability?
Restaurant sustainability was in vogue a decade-and-a-half ago. In 2010, the three Michelin-starred chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten opened ABC Kitchen, a restaurant built around food sourced from the nearby Union Square Greenmarket, with recycled-paper menus, thrifted staff uniforms and a boho farmhouse aesthetic. It won the 2011 James Beard Foundation’s award for “Best New Restaurant.” That same year, Adam Platt — New York magazine’s former chief restaurant critic who coined the term “haute barnyard” to describe restaurants embracing mossy green hues and earthy mains — wrote that farm-to-table dining was, “the most fashionable and formulaic trend of our time.”
Today, New Yorkers’ once boiling obsession with whitewashed brick walls and locally sourced, plant-forward ingredients has been brought down to a simmer. Even Eleven Madison Park, the renowned three Michelin-starred restaurant that boldly reopened as vegan in June 2021, ended its plant-based experiment last year. Chef Daniel Humm explained, “it became clear that while we had built something meaningful, we had also unintentionally kept people out.”
In today’s operating environment, New York City restaurants cannot afford to alienate diners. Inflation, higher wages, tightened consumer spending habits and even younger generations drinking less alcohol have put the industry under mounting financial pressures. While sustainable measures can ease some of that burden — Rhodora, the country’s first zero-waste natural wine bar in Fort Greene, has estimated it saves an average of $300 a month by eliminating trash pickup — marketing those measures may no longer carry the weight it once did with diners.
“Most people want to have a good time,” said Alex Pincus, one of the brothers behind restaurant group Crew and its flagship oyster bar, Grand Banks. “They don’t want to be lectured. They don’t want [dining out] to be this dogmatic thing.”
Grand Banks, located aboard a historic wooden sailboat docked in Tribeca, focuses on sustainably harvested seafood and underutilized species. But diners would have to look closely to find that out: The restaurant’s sourcing philosophy is listed in just three words, “local, wild, sustainable,” in tiny type at the bottom of the page.
Pincus would rather let the oyster do most of the talking. Working with a grower in Peconic Bay on Long Island, he developed a proprietary strain of oyster, Sailor Baby, named after his son. The oyster is Crew’s best-selling variety and supplied the restaurateur with control over how it’s grown, transported, served, and … recycled.
Grand Banks participates in Billion Oyster Project’s shell-recycling program, which collects discarded shells from 73 restaurants across the city and uses them to build reef structures that support marine habitat restoration in New York Harbor. Pincus serves on the board of the nonprofit, which strives to make participation as easy as possible for restaurant partners by providing collection bins, training staff and arranging pickups. But the program still adds work to a busy kitchen: Staff must separate shells from other waste and store them until they can be collected. With storage space at a premium, some restaurant partners keep their bins outside, where warmer weather can bring unwelcome odors and vermin.
Much of this work is invisible to diners. According to Kristi Chaudhuri, the organization’s shell recycling program manager, participation in this program ultimately depends on buy-in from restaurant management, not consumer interest: “It's definitely coming from the leadership, and it’s up to leadership to make staff excited about what they’re doing.”
Chaudhuri said that while some restaurant owners detail their partnership with the Billion Oyster Project on their menus, many, including Grand Banks, do not.
Of course, some New York City restaurants still wear their sustainability commitments on their sleeve. Starrlight Bakery, a sourdough micro-bakery in Bushwick, stamps that commitment, “Made from Solar Power,” on the roughly 2,000 loaves that leave the bakery each week. Owner Emanuel Ruffler, who at one point obtained a solar panel installer license, has overheard customers in line tell friends they specifically came to the bakery because it runs on solar power.
Ruffler has sought several creative ways to make the connection between the climate-conscious infrastructure powering his ovens and the bread he sells tangible. At one point, Starrlight loaves featured “climate action” stickers, each suggesting a small step customers could take to reduce their own carbon footprint. Ruffler even offered a free loaf to anyone who signed up to purchase solar energy for their home through a community solar project.
“No one got any free bread,” he said. “It didn’t rise to the urgency to really do it.”
Even if sustainability no longer carries the marketing cachet it once did, it hasn’t disappeared from the New York City dining scene. Instead, it’s increasingly embedded in the daily calculations made to survive and compete in this restaurant-eat-restaurant world. As Andrew Rigie, executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance, put it, “Sustainability has evolved from something that could be a marketing hook into something much more fundamental to how many restaurants think about operating their businesses.”
At Golden Ratio, working with what’s available — making lemonade from lemon pulp, rind and peel — is as much a catalyst for experimentation as it is a financial consideration.
“[Sustainability]’s one of those challenges, like working seasonally, that is a constraint that really pushes creativity,” said Kristensen.
Ingredients that might otherwise have been discarded become something you can order. And, while it might go unadvertised, that creativity comes in a coupe glass.
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Samantha Dady
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