News

July 30, 2009

Roof-Top Bounty

The new horizon for green-minded restaurants is shifting several floors higher to the tarred and vent-studded expanses of their rooftops. Chefs in urban areas are turning the usually wasted space into mini-farms where they can grow herbs, vegetables and fruits, or even install beehives.

Converts say the installations—which can cost a few thousand dollars to install—are more about food quality and freshness than a means of generating more profit. "Maybe in the summertime you might save a little on tomatoes," says Parke Ulrich, the chef who outfitted Waterbar in San Francisco with herb and vegetable beds. But "you're not going to save on food costs as much as you think."

The returns are "being more connected to the food we serve [and] having a greater flexibility in creating dishes," said a spokeswoman for Incanto in San Francisco, where Executive Chef Chris Cosentino maintains a rooftop garden. "This isn't about the dollars."

Still, at a time when consumers are clearly favoring local ingredients served fresh off the farm, rooftop gardens can deliver a powerful impression, even if the output is merely a supplement to purchased supplies. "Anytime you can offer something that nobody else can, it's a marketing advantage," said the Incanto spokeswoman.

The business advantages have encouraged The Fairmont lodging chain to install rooftop gardens atop several of its properties, including The Fairmont in Dallas. There, chef J. W. Foster grows some 2,000 varieties of herbs, vegetables and fruits in the downtown property's garden. The harvest includes eggplant, watermelon, zucchini and a number of different chili peppers, all of which are featured in the hotel's Pyramid restaurant.

Included are plants endemic to Texas, and the hotel takes the additional green step of irrigating the garden with run-off water from its cooling system.

The Fairmont properties in Toronto, Vancouver and New Brunswick, Canada, also feature rooftop gardens. The 4,000-square-foot garden of the Fairmont Royal York in Toronto, a prototype of sorts for the other hotels, hosts honeybee hives.

The Waterbar has a much more modest spread: 25 29-inch-by-13.5-inch beds, each offering about 3 square feet of space. Ulrich uses EarthBoxes, a premade planter that has a built-in watering system.

"We started with 10, went to 20 by the end of last year, and we'll probably go to 30 this year," says Ulrich.

Ten of the boxes are used for tomatoes, and "we get about 50 to 60 tomatoes per box," the chef notes. "We also grow a lot of arugula," which is used in a signature "Rooftop Arugula Salad," and a lot of herbs.

Plants were selected to provide more of an "accent" than a bounty, said Ulrich. "If we did something like squash, we could use up the whole crop on one Friday night," he explained. "It just supplements what we're doing."

Incanto's garden consists of eight planters ranging in size from 48 to 12 square feet each for a garden that encompasses about 800 square feet. The restaurant spent about $2,000 to build the beds, and estimated that it spends about $300 a year on soil and seeds.

Maintenance requires two to three days a year of soil conditioning and planting, and about two to four hours of watering and weeding per week. The work is done by Consentino's staff.

The restaurant uses the garden in part to grow herbs—such as pineapple sage and chive flowers—that aren't readily available through suppliers. The rooftop items are flagged wherever possible on the menu through descriptors like "rooftop rosemary" or "Duncan Street nepitella" (or calamint).

The representatives of Incanto and Waterbar both recommend that chefs check with a structural engineer to determine the amount of weight a rooftop can bear before they start hauling up dirt and filling planters.

Incanto's Consentino and co-owner Mark Pastore recommend that would-be gardeners consider what items they could grow that other restaurants in the area can't source in order to glean a marketing advantage. They also advise that a restaurant calculate how much of an herb it might need to feature a dish and if it can grow that much.

"Start small," advises Waterbar's Ulrich. "Keep it easy, and grow what you know. Realize that you can't grow everything for all your needs." Otherwise, he says, you'll find yourself being more of a gardener and less of a chef.