At Somebody People — a Denver restaurant with Mediterranean-inspired, plant-based cuisine — the commitment to sustainability is just as important as the food quality. The restaurant makes no secret of its mission: Menus list the farms from which it sources ingredients, and a strict no single-use plastics policy is in place. Instead, guests receive leftovers in compostable containers or reusable Mason jars.
One of the restaurant’s most distinctive sustainability initiatives is its popular Sunday supper. Each week, executive chef Justin Freeman and his team create a new menu from scratch using surplus ingredients left over from the week. The initiative allows the culinary team to flex their creativity while reducing food waste.
“At the start of the week, our goal is to finish the rest of our week off by using everything in the building,” Freeman said. “We tailor menus to what we already have so, if Sunday comes up, and we only have rutabaga, we’ll figure out how we can incorporate that rutabaga into a recipe instead of turnips, for example.”
Some of the most inventive Sunday supper dishes include reusing leftover pasta sauce for a pizza special the next day, reducing excess potato soup into a sauce for vegetables, using leftover citrus rinds for cocktail shrubs, and even making ice cream out of used coffee grounds.
“This process is actually so fun,” Freeman said. “Our menu is pretty small, so this gives us the chance to make stuff every single day that will eventually get cooked. It gives my cooks an idea of how to see an ingredient and figure out how to reutilize it. … I think it makes our team more fully engaged.”
While Freeman’s ultimate goal is to get Somebody People to zero food waste, he sees the Sunday supper ritual as an important step in that direction — a creative outlet that keeps ingredients out of the trash. One of the most efficient waste-reduction recipes on the menu is the onion soup, made with a broth created from onion skins that would normally be discarded.
“The onion soup was something I’ve done at other restaurants before, and I just thought it was amazing,” he said. “It makes a really round earthy broth and brings a lot of extra flavor. … If you look at different cultures, everyone reuses stuff. In Japan, they dry out bones for broths and they’ll use every part of the fish. They respect the whole ingredient. I always think about how we can do the same.”
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