Cape Town eateries reuse cooking water, change menus

PASTA and boiled vegetables are disappearing from some menus as restaurants do their bit to save every drop of water in droughtravaged Cape Town.

Residents and businesses are experimenting with various solutions to cut down their consumption of water as city authorities warn of a looming “Day Zero” crisis.

Many of the city’s restaurants are saving water while still serving the best possible meals to their customers.

Staff at Pane E Vino Food and Wine Bar in Stellenbosch are encouraged to bring their own drinking water from home.

“We reuse most of our water. The water we use to cook our spinach is reused to wash our dishes; we use the water that we wash our cutlery with for our garden‚” said head of the kitchen Akihirah Erasmus. “Pasta is really popular on our menu and it uses a lot of water to make so we reuse that water for our dishes or the garden.”

Over in Newlands‚ the Vineyard Hotel has discarded pasta meals from the menus at their restaurants and patrons can no longer order boiled vegetables. Executive chief Carl Van Rooyen said different cooking techniques had been implemented to save water.

“We don’t boil anymore, we steam. We have taken pasta off our dinner menu‚” he said.

Water used to wash vegetables was transferred to 200 litre drums and stored for other uses.

“No more boiling of anything‚ it is all steaming and frying and deep frying and shallow frying‚” said Van Rooyen.

David Haupt‚ owner at A Tavola‚ an Italian restaurant in Claremont‚ said water from their ice buckets was reused to mop the floors: “At the end of the day we do what we do until we no longer can. The problem is not with us it is with the gross mismanagement of our water system. Until we learn to address that it would be silly of us in trying to save 10 litres here and 20 litres there. All the water we use in terms of our ice buckets gets reused to mop our floors. As I implement various things my staff are also becoming more aware but for the vast majority of people the message is not getting through.”

Villa 47 Restaurant in the city centre has introduced water saving devices on their taps.

“We use 25-litre water containers to catch the overflow from the ice machines and the ice wells.

We are catching all the water from the ice machines and aircons and we use those for the washing of floors. We don’t make use of tablecloths and we use paper napkins only‚” said operations manager Peter Douglas. —