wastED at Blue Hill - Dan Barber and "trash" ingredients

Most importantly, each of the dishes on the menu—priced at fifteen dollars, regardless of size or ingredients—is made from edible things that most people would consider trash, and much of which would have been otherwise thrown away: broken razor clams, beet roots, cheese whey. “The amazing thing about this project,” Barber told me a few days later, standing in the kitchen as the first orders of the night were being prepared and plated, “is that everything on this menu is done in restaurants. These aren’t new ideas. This is the seventeen-dollar ravioli from yesterday’s greens or braised meat, mixed with cheese.” Using whatever happens to be lying around, Barber said, is something that chefs do all the time, including the big names—Grant Achatz, Dominique Ansel, April Bloomfield—that he’d invited to devise nightly specials.

The difference with wastED is that the menu tells the truth in the plainest terms. “Cured cuts of waste-fed pig” are served with “reject carrot mustard, off-grade sweet potatoes, melba toast from yesterday’s oatmeal.” “Dry-aged beef ends broth” features “malt rootlets, mystery vegetables and peels” and “cow corn crackers.” A glossary elaborates when necessary: off-grade, it explains, means “below a commercially recognized standard of quality.” (“Farmers, processors and retailers,” it went on, “often discard produce if it does not meet certain aesthetic specifications.”) Dry-aged beef ends are “the hard exterior layers of dry-aged beef.”