Splashy San Francisco Restaurant Shuggie's fighting food waste in style
SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX) -- You may have used upcycling clothes or furniture but would you try upcycled food?
People are lining up daily outside Shuggie's Trash Pie + Natural Wine for a one-of-a-kind feast at the city's first restaurant dedicated to eliminating food waste and fighting climate change. Diners have waited up to two hours outside to get a table, according to the owners.
The space is eye-popping, funky and monochromatic. The Mission District restaurant on 23rd Street is turning heads and calling attention to serious mission -- saving the planet.
Co-owners David Murphy and Kayla Abe are using ugly or blemished produce, farm surplus and offcuts of meats and fish and making them the stars of their menu. It's the stuff that would normally be thrown out.
"No, we're not dumpster diving. Everything is really, really beautiful stuff, like wilted greens that are sitting out at the farmers market all day," Murphy said. "What happens to those? People are always going after the beautiful, crispy stuff like the things that look the best but, often times, blemished or wilty greens or blemished tomatoes or a radish that have two little legs -- those things get overlooked."
Shuggie's calls itself food waste paradise.
For example, the pizza dough contains whey, a byproduct of their cheesemaking process and oat flour, which is left over from the oat-milk-making process.
"In America, we waste up to 40% of our entire food supply, so whether that's at the farm level things that are looked over because of cosmetic irregularity, they don't have outlets for them or all the way down to the consumer level where we're taking too big a portion on our plate and discarding that," said Abe.
Abe and Murphy are also the founders of the Ugly Pickle Company. To date, they say they've save upwards of 40,000 pounds of produce through various projects.
They want customers to eat their way to a sustainable future and maybe even try something new.
"You want people to eat first and then they're going to start asking questions because they're like 'man what is this? This is so good!' And then they find out -- 'oh man this is chicken hearts, oh it's chicken hearts? I never knew I like chicken hearts!'" Murphy said.
The wines at Shuggie's are also made without additives from small batch producers.
