Green Dream

FOOD AND DRINK GREEN DREAM

A Supper That Sustains Us is part of 1 Kitchen Nashville’s green focus

BY MARGARET LITTMAN

Think about a wine bottle. Not the label. Not the price tag. Not the taste. Not the provenance of the grapes from whence the wine came. The bottle itself. What happens to it when you’ve toasted your last toast and drunk your last drop?

In Nashville, in many cases, it ends up in the trash. The city has limited glass recycling programs, particularly on the commercial scale — glass used in home consumption can be dropped off at one of the neighborhood convenience centers or picked up by a private recycler.

At 1 Hotel Nashville, the new sustainably

focused downtown hotel, tossing the glass didn’t seem like an option that was consistent with its green mission. So the hotel, which has 215 rooms and multiple restaurants and bars, installed a pulverizer to ground all its glass into sand. Burlap bags then are filled with the sand, and plans are in the works for finding options for donating the repurposed goods. Possibilities include using it as construction materials in affordable housing projects or as sandbags in flood prevention. (Testing is still underway to see where the aggregate will perform best.) In the future, Nicholas Farina, general manager of 1 Hotel Nashville, would like the hotel to become a drop-off site where Nashvillians can bring glass that can’t otherwise be recycled. Recycled glass is also used to make the inroom wine carafes.

Creating a system for turning excess beer bottles and wine bottles into sand is one example of how the luxury hotel creates its green footprint, says Farina, who serves on the Mayor’s Council on Sustainability. The glass is just one example of how the hotel, which opened on Demonbreun in June, is looking to create more mindful, sustainable moments in a city where environmental impact is not always top of mind.

The new-construction building is an example of biophilic design, an approach to architecture that aims to connect people inside buildings to the outside world using natural light and landscaping. Guest rooms have live plants, in-room filtered water taps to encourage refilling water bottles and small hourglasses to help track how long guests run water in the shower.

The hotel is largely paperless, with rocks instead of paper do-not-disturb signs, chalkboards instead of notepads and wooden keys. Business cards and other necessary paper are printed on materials that contain wildflower seeds so they can be plowed back into the earth, and they have useful reference information printed on the back. Hangers are made from recycled materials. The kitchen doesn’t even have a printer for its orders — everything is sent through electronically. If you order room service, you’ll sign the check on an app, not on paper. Vendors are encouraged to reduce the amount of wrapping materials for delivery — fish is delivered in a reusable cooler rather than plastic.

The idea is for all of these elements to exist but in a nonintrusive way and without a schoolmarm tone.

“We’re not activists in the sense that we want to show people a different way of doing things, because we are a luxury hotel experience,” Farina says. “We want to do things in a way that we are educating people and making them think and hopefully eventually change some sort of future behavior. We just encourage people to take a pause.”

A good opportunity for just such a long pause? When the hotel’s main restaurant, 1 Kitchen, participates in the chain’s quarterly dinner series, A Supper That Sustains Us. The idea of the series, which started in New York with chef Jonathan Waxman, is to highlight local purveyors and beverage partners with a four-course family-style dinner featuring the farmer or other purveyor present.

“Everybody says they’re farm-to-table, but are they really?” asks 1 Kitchen Nashville culinary director Chris Crary. “We really wanted to take that to the next step.”

Crary, a Top Chef alum, came to Nashville from the 1 Kitchen in West Hollywood, where he had a property featuring a 2,000-square-foot garden and a honeyproducing beehive. Crary volunteered to helm the Nashville restaurant in part because his grandmother was from Tennessee, and he wanted to explore his Southern roots — from pawpaws to stinging nettles — and in part because he felt his experience in California could help Nashville when it comes to waste reduction and recycling.

Nashville’s A Supper That Sustains Us series started in September with Smyrna’s 400-acre Bloomsbury Farm. For every dinner purchased (tickets were $100 each), the restaurant donated a meal to those in need in Nashville. Copia, an organization that allows businesses to donate excess food, also helps 1 Kitchen Nashville make good use of its leftovers. A Supper That Sustains Us will have its next installment in November, with that partner to be announced soon. Farina says it may eventually become a monthly event.

The dinner series is designed to not only show off 1 Kitchen Nashville’s partners, but also to underscore its other efforts to create zero-waste dishes. Menus are built with seasonal produce, with an aim of sourcing 75 percent of ingredients from within a 200-mile radius. (It’s hard to find locally grown avocados, for example.) The bar includes a biodynamic and organic wine list and a sustainable cocktail program featuring zero-waste cocktails and sustainable liquors. Cray sources meat and seafood ethically and says he enjoys working with Tennessee farms. While many of the farms here may be smaller than the ones he worked with in California, he appreciates the focus of the farmers who may grow a smaller number of varieties and do that exceedingly well.

“It is really nice to see seasons,” Crary says. “I’m not used to seasons. California has summer and award season.” He says waiting for tomatoes to come into season was rewarding anticipation for him. He’s planning to grow root vegetables and flowering herbs at the hotel to supplement what he’s buying from local farmers.

On the back end, the hotel watches its utility usage, particularly when it comes to things like the A/C running when no one is in the guest room, or the speed of the ventilation hood in the kitchen. An iPad tracks all waste that leaves the hotel, weighing it and tracking cardboard recycling. “Until you know the numbers that are attached with your impact, there’s not a lot you can do to change it,” Farina says. The restaurant composts all green waste and recycles its cooking oil.

Both Crary and Farina hope to help improve Nashville’s sustainability infrastructure, which has room for improvement. Eight states have banned polystyrene foam, so seeing Styrofoam used in takeout containers (and in the trash downtown) has been an adjustment. “I hadn’t seen Styrofoam in years,” Crary says. Of course, 1 Kitchen Nashville’s takeout packaging is compostable.

Crary, the father of two, cites his kids as a motivator for his sustainable practices. “I want them to grow up and live somewhere that’s not polluted, that’s not overrun by landfills and off-gases, and I want them to know that the food that they’re eating isn’t tainted with chemicals.”

There’s a health benefit to the 1 Kitchen perspective, too, he adds: “Eating locally, eating in-season is better for you and better for the environment.” EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

1 KITCHEN AT 1 HOTEL NASHVILLE 710 DEMONBREUN ST. 1HOTELS.COM/NASHVILLE/TASTE/1-KITCHEN

A SUPPER THAT SUSTAINS US