On-trade experts give free sustainability advice
Máté Szabó, the founder of Elysian Budapest, has created The Sustainable Documents in collaboration with Angelos Bafas and Hyacinthe Lescoët.
“The Sustainable Documents is a free publication created to support bars and hospitality professionals in building more local, thoughtful, and sustainable ways of working,” said Szabó.
The initiative will be an ongoing annual series, with a new document focusing on a key topic every year. Each year, Szabó will collaborate with bars from around the world.
This year’s contributors are Angelos Bafas, co-founder of Cato; Hyacinthe Lescoët, of the Cambridge Public House and Little Red Door; Vijay Mudaliar, of Native in Singapore; and Lam Duc Anh (Leo) and Dinh Thep of Stir in Ho Chi Minh City.
“Our ambition is to build more than just a document series,” Szabó added. “We want to help create a real movement within hospitality, one that makes sustainability more practical, more open, more collaborative, and more actionable for bars everywhere.
“What makes the project special is that it brings together respected bars with different realities, challenges, and approaches, and turns that collective knowledge into something useful for others. Rather than presenting sustainability as a perfect ideology, we wanted to create a resource that feels honest, applicable, and grounded in real bar life.”
The first edition of The Sustainable Documents addresses ‘locality as structural design’, which asks how one can build a bar that reflects where it is and use local ingredients practically rather than performatively.
Tips include mapping what is available nearby and seasonally, and creating a picture of the local ecosystem, including farmers, foragers, markets, distillers and more.
It advises not redesigning full menus overnight, instead beginning with a small number of ingredients and testing them. “One fresh ingredient, one preserved ingredient and one local product with longer-term potential is often enough to begin,” it reads.
Other topics cover classification, preservation, flexibility, menu design and more.
The document can be found here: https://www.elysianbudapest.com/thesustainabledocuments.
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