Would you drink a cocktail made from day-old pastries? A martini made from leftover feta brine? With over half of US food waste coming from the food industry, bartenders are getting crafty with solutions to help the situation. Fruit pulp, vegetable rinds, meat scraps—even yesterday’s croissants—are moving from the kitchen to the bar, creating wild and wonderful cocktails with less landfill waste. But do upcycled cocktails make a difference?
Sitting above the bar at N/Soto in Los Angeles, jars of crystalized fruit make up the laboratory of Reed Windle, where stone fruit scraps evolve into shōchū cocktails. “It’s a symbiotic relationship,” he says of his cocktail lab. The Izakaya atmosphere, a more casual spot from the team behind Michelin-starred N/Naka, encourages Windle to play, fermenting scraps of fruits used in N/Soto’s small plates, combining them with shōchū for up to six months, depending on the ripeness of the fruit, for his Chu-Hi cocktail. Windle meticulously tracks his experiments in a thick notebook, noting how the sweetness of each fruit adds to the complexity of a cocktail, that rice vodka might be too strong for one fruit, or exactly when to ferment black plums. Because of this, he’s directly involved in what ingredients make it onto the kitchen menu to minimize ingredient waste; the number of test jars above the bar just keeps growing.
Including the bar program in the restaurant menu is about more than using any old scraps left in the kitchen, it encourages a symbiotic relationship across drink and dish.
Kenzo Han, bar director of Firstborn in LA’s Chinatown, does not limit using scraps solely for sustainability, but also as an opportunity to build flavor. When the kitchen needed to make a menu change, Han helped decide what to sub in, instinctually knowing the fat drippings from a 30-day dry-aged lamb saddle would add a nutty layer to a Rob Roy–inspired cocktail.
This partnership and “use everything” mindset shapes Firstborn’s zero-proof menu too. “People my age aren’t going to bars as much, or we’re not drinking,” which inspired Han to make a nonalcoholic program that was just as enticing as their high-proof cocktails.
Han is especially drawn to the “continuous loop of production [of kombucha],” in which the low-alcohol content draws out the flavors of the produce, but during the fermentation process, bacteria depletes the alcohol. Firstborn focuses on reusing that kombucha base and applying seasonal fruits to refresh the zero-proof menu regularly instead of stocking out-of-season fruits to create the same old mocktails and eventually throwing out the unused fruits. Han has become comfortable leaving classic drinks off the menu and saying no to some requests, opting for innovative twists with seasonal food scraps instead. “Bars don’t have to have everything,” Han says.
As innovative as a menu might be, patrons might still find it, well, gross to drink leftovers.
This was a consideration at Brooklyn listening bar Mr. Melo, which has offered upcycled cocktails since it opened in 2023. Co-owner Nikolas Vagenas went all-in with his “Compost Cocktails” menu, which boasts a smoked eggplant-infused tequila drink, and a feta brine martini with (you guessed it) the brine from feta cheese on the food menu. Yes, he knows the “Compost” menu name may turn some folks off; not everyone craves food scraps in cocktails, but getting to zero-waste is personal to Vagenas. For instance, the Yiya cocktail is crafted with oleo syrup from cucumber scraps and citrus brine of leftover peels and topped with a fragrant tzatziki float of yogurt and pickled onion brine, a homage to his grandmother “who threw everything into her tzatziki, even if it looked a little ugly.” Vagenas believes approachable flavors and a $13 price point—other drinks start at $17—encourages people to try the upcycled beverages. “We’re using something that we're saving money on.”
Reusing fruit rinds has already impacted the amount of trash created at Mr. Melo, but Vagenas is also thinking about what’s next. He’s looking at processes like “super juicing,” a high-tech way of preserving juice for longer by adding the natural acids of lemon and lime peels. He’s turning thick pulp into fruit leather, and saving used olive oil in concentrated pucks. For him, there are endless ways to craft cocktails with food scraps if you’ve got imagination.
Even with all this innovation, there are other elements of bar waste that haunt sustainability experts. For one, there are very few federal standards for composting across the United States, and some ingredients, like cooking oils, can’t even be composted. Others say we’re looking at the wrong problem, and that the amount of packaging waste being created, like single-use plastics and shipping materials, outsizes food waste completely.
For Kelsey Ramage, bad industry habits, like buying bulk from global distributors instead of local farms, keep her up at night. For 17 years she’s focused on “nose to tail and root to fruit” (with the awards to prove it) as collaborator of Trash Tiki pop-ups. Now, with Trash Collective, she creates food waste recipes and sustainability practices for hospitality groups. For example, she created a recipe for a milk punch using day-old croissants from the breakfast buffet for a hotel client.
Buying from farmers markets, rather than bulk shipping produce, contributes to the local ecosystem, with fresher fruit traveling fewer miles and less going bad before making it to their destination, but this requires bars to edit their menus. Does every bar really need a daiquiri on the menu? “We have options now that 20 years ago we didn’t,” Ramage explains.
Some small producers have taken on packaging as a personal challenge, like Lance Hanson of Colorado’s Jack Rabbit Hill Farm, who tried to change the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau “standard to fill” limits to allow the sale of spirits in kegs. This practice would cut down on bottles ending up in the trash. “I got in front of the governor, I went to Washington, and I didn’t have the bandwidth or money to push the boulder up the hill,” Hanson says.
When his David and Goliath tale didn’t work out, Hanson became the cocktail version of a milkman: He retrieves, cleans, and reuses Mell Zero-Waste Vodka bottles. His partnership with Big Red F Restaurant Group offsets approximately 6,200 miles in emissions, according to Hanson’s math. But he can’t match the discount prices from global powerhouses that ship cheap spirits internationally—he thinks those massive chains will create waste until patrons become as curious about where their drinks come from as they do their steak.
Ramage sees promise in artistry, saying “I love that drinkers are more open to weirder things that are not typically used in drinks.” Changing a menu to leave off the classics might be terrifying to some bars, but the payoff is an eye-catching drink no one else is making.
Like Han, Vagenas, and Windle, she believes using and reusing ingredients in interesting ways will attract patrons, and that’s the key to real change. You can be as sustainable as you want, but if people won’t drink it, the program doesn’t work. Upcycled drinks, scrappy, a little stinky, and curious, are one powerful tool toward changing our drinking culture to be more sustainable.