Where to have a zero waste night out: the top Hong Kong bars committed to serving eco-friendly drinks
- Booze-fuelled revelry doesn’t lend itself to restraint, but environmentally ethical Hong Kong bars like John Anthony, Potato Head and Draft Land are offering drinks produced with sustainable practices
Hong Kong has a waste problem. A report from the Environmental Protection Department last year stated that the amount of daily wasted produced was the highest in 20 years. Between 2002 and 2012, the amount of waste generated by commercial and industrial sources, such as restaurants, bars and hotels, doubled. With the city’s landfills reportedly close to being full, it is a trend that clearly cannot continue.
At least we’re not adding to the cycle [of waste] and buying more ingredients
Restaurants have for many years been attempting to reduce their waste. The drinks industry, however, has been slow to catch on. Booze-fuelled late-night revelry just doesn’t readily lend itself to restraint and considered thinking.
One establishment looking to change that attitude is John Anthony, in Causeway Bay. The modern Cantonese restaurant’s bar recently became the first in the city to introduce a zero waste programme. Featuring sustainable, locally foraged ingredients – such as verbena from Fanling and honey made in Sha Tin – owners Maximal Concepts hope it will “establish a new gold standard of sustainability” in the local bar industry.
“We did prep today and the only waste we had was a carton box from the almond milk,” says a proud Amir Javaid, bar manager at John Anthony.
As well as its range of local ingredients, the bar now has its own compost machine, which means John Anthony no longer sends food to landfill where it contributes to carbon emissions. That is on top of the many sustainable practices already in place such as uniforms upcycled from deadstock, menus printed on recycled menus from other Maximal restaurants, and terracotta tiles taken from abandoned village houses.
John Anthony has a new drinks menu inspired by the old Silk Road, which puts its sustainable practices front and centre. We try Into The Wilderness, a mix of gin infused with lemon verbena, “waste falernum”, a liqueur fashioned from leftover ingredients, and an organic almond distillate. The result is a pleasant combination of sour and spicy, alleviated by the sweetness of the “recycled” pineapple garnish.
