A Zero-Waste Restaurant in Mexico City: “It’s the Kind of Innovation the World Needs.”

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Packed in a pantry full of shiny jars, a team of cooks inspects a cheong made from lime peels that would normally have gone to waste. This unassuming warehouse located on a residential street in Mexico City fuels the elegant restaurant Baldío, the latest in the capital to earn a green Michelin star.

Baldío was founded jointly by brothers Lucio and Pablo Usobiaga and chef Doug McMaster, known for his innovative restaurant Silo London, which generates no waste and lacks trash bins. “In a country with such biodiversity and so much wealth in ancestral knowledge as Mexico, Baldío shouldn’t be special,” says Pablo Usobiaga. “We have everything needed for this to be the norm, yet it seems like a countercultural movement.”

The food is creative, but essentially Mexican: pumpkin tostada with guacamole and broccoli, agave flower, agave worm, chinampa flower, or pasture-raised pork from Veracruz with tamarind mole, served with chinampa vegetables. Meticulous planning is required, from supply sources to preparation. The founders are also responsible for Arca Tierra, a regenerative agriculture project that involves a network of 50 farmers in central Mexico, in addition to the organization’s own chinampa in the pre-Aztec canal system of Xochimilco, in southern Mexico City.

“Of course it’s complicated, but this is the kind of innovation our world needs,” McMaster argues. “We must examine the debris of this civilization and figure out how to build something new.”

Although dishes are finished in view of diners in the restaurant’s open kitchen, most of the preparation occurs at La Baldega, the workshop where the team carries out the fermentation program that helps preserve ingredients and reuse byproducts like skin and cartilage. “If Baldío is the face of the project, La Baldega is the brain,” says Lucio Usobiaga. “All discarded ingredients return here to be transformed.”

The team applies butchery principles to fruits and vegetables, cutting them to extract as many nutrients as possible. For instance, limes are zested and juiced, and then the white part is turned into cheong, a Korean ferment sweetened with sugar.

One of the fundamental ingredients is koji —cooked rice or soy mixed with the aspergillus oryzae fungus to facilitate the fermentation process— a technique popular in Japan and China for thousands of years. The team uses it with such good results in a fish sauce that they can’t stop purchasing more bones and offal from other restaurants, including Máximo by Eduardo García.

According to the World Bank, around 20 million tons of food are lost or wasted in Mexico each year (about 35% of the country’s total production). Much of this waste is edible and could feed the 24 million Mexicans who go hungry daily, but instead, it rots in the fields or is trucked to landfills where, as it decomposes, it produces methane, which is 25 times more effectively contributes to global warming than carbon dioxide. According to the United Nations, while one in nine people worldwide is malnourished, food waste is responsible for up to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

“Many consumers do not realize the impact of food waste, not only in economic terms, but also regarding the natural resources needed to produce it,” says Claudia Sánchez Castro from the Mexican Food Bank Network (Red BAMX), a non-profit organization that coordinates a national network of 60 food banks, partially supplied with recovered food. “Moreover, it has significant social repercussions in a country where millions face food insecurity,” she adds.

From the field to our kitchen, food is wasted at every link of the supply chain. However, the hospitality sector—with its buffet culture, lack of protocols for managing leftovers, and highly variable daily demand—is especially prone to this.

When Silo opened its doors in 2014, it was the world’s first restaurant without trash bins, raising the bar for what zero waste means. Today, they use less than 1% of food as compost and do not employ single-use materials. A specialized pottery transforms glass into porcelain, which is used for both tableware and lamps and tiles.

Baldío is part of a new wave of restaurants worldwide that go beyond vague sustainability statements and adopt a low or zero waste ethic. In Lisbon, SEM, by Silo alumni Lara Santo and George McLeod, ensures that over 90% of the resources they use are plastic-free, with the remaining 10% reused to make furniture through collaborations with local design studios. Flores, a family restaurant in Nijmegen (Netherlands), dries offal in koji to later grate over meat dishes. In Helsinki, Nolla (meaning zero in Finnish) gives away compost to its suppliers and customers, a different kind of leftovers policy.

“Private companies can play a crucial role in reducing food waste,” states Heather Latino, clinical instructor at the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School. “The influence, resources, and outreach capabilities of restaurants allow them to also impact policies, such as setting tax incentives for food donations or improving waste management infrastructures.”

“We want Mexicans to feel proud”

The greatest obstacle that Baldío encountered in its first year was being too groundbreaking. “I think some Mexicans believe that zero waste contradicts the culture of abundance that has long been associated with luxury,” says Pablo Usobiaga. “Our clientele is mostly foreign, and that worries us: absolutely everything here is from this country. We want Mexicans to feel proud when they come in.”

The restaurant tries to tackle this issue by speaking as little as possible about the zero waste process on social media and instructing waiters to explain it only to diners who ask specifically.

The kitchen team, composed entirely of women and led by Yucatecan chef Laura Cabrera, also leans towards more familiar Mexican flavors. Tamales are served with mushroom barbacoa, a vegan version of the classic Oaxacan dish, while the drink menu includes a corn liquor cocktail topped with totomoxtle ash, as well as pre-Hispanic Mexican drinks like tepache and pulque.

On a Saturday night, diner Santiago Nicieza is about to enjoy a plate of small vegetables grown just eight kilometers away, from the chinampas of Xochimilco, served over a layer stained with pipián seasoned with black garlic. This is his second visit to the restaurant. “I expected various ferments and surprising flavors, but this time they’ve delved even deeper into Mexican culture and I love it,” he says while savoring a carambola pulque. Baldío offers flavors kissed by fire, bold sauces, and deliciously contrasting textures. It is unmistakably Mexican cuisine, yet totally unique at the same time.