News & insights / Insights / 02.04.26

How Restaurants Can Redefine Luxury Dining to Incorporate Circularity

At Nén Danang, Vietnam, Chef Summer Le places some “chef’s bites” on the pass, ready to surprise the next table with an unexpected treat. The tender pieces of duck are, in fact, the tapered ends of breasts that would otherwise be trimmed away and discarded. With a little added attention and creativity from Summer and her team, they’re now being put to work, providing an extra touch of luxury for her guests.

More hospitality businesses around the world are realising that reducing food waste is a business no-brainer, providing a practical way to cut unnecessary costs while reducing environmental impact. Improving metrics like water, energy, land use, pollution and biodiversity loss and providing a straightforward way to tackle Scope 3 emissions, this is one of the single most powerful actions a business can take to reduce its overall environmental footprint.

The catch lies in how this can successfully be translated into an enticing guest experience. Particularly for fine dining establishments, menus have traditionally been designed around abundance and excess: the more exclusive, exotic and resource-intensive the ingredient, the more the guest could feel reassured that their money was buying them both pleasure and prestige.

Now, as high-end dining looks towards a more responsible approach to menu design, that paradigm is beginning to shift. Leading chefs are redefining excellence, with aspects like seasonality, provenance and care for people, place and resources acting as new signals of care and attention. The opportunity is to set a new standard of excellence: offering guests an even better experience, while using fewer resources in smarter ways.

Crafting the right narrative

Luckily, sustainability and a luxury experience can indeed go hand in hand — it’s all about finding the right ways to communicate this to diners without negatively affecting their perceptions of value and pleasure. While people like to know that their food choices are having a positive impact, they don’t want to feel like they’re being deprived in order to accomplish this.

Language that hints at restriction or compromise doesn’t sell; both chefs and front-of-house teams need to find a way to communicate a zero-waste strategy in a way that speaks to luxury and opulence. A simple shift in positioning can turn waste prevention from something boring, ascetic and reductive into an offering that feels sumptuous and hedonistic, actively improving the guest experience.

Let’s not forget the influence that high-end restaurants hold in shaping food culture, creating trends that echo throughout the rest of the sector and are later translated into how we eat at home. By cleverly reframing food waste as a desirable material that is additive within the fine dining context, chefs can not only embed circularity into their own operations, but can ultimately influence how society might view and value waste in the future.

De Vie, Paris: circularity over sustainability

Alex Francis is Co-founder and Director at De Vie, an award-winning restaurant and bar in Paris. He shares how his team approaches this repositioning. “We prefer to speak about circularity over sustainability, focusing the narrative on maximising flavour and continuity of concept,” he says. “We actively avoid confronting guests with any illusion of compromise in their experience. For example, when using a chocolate alternative such as THIC from Endless Food Company, we compare the flavour to chocolate, but with added depth from the malted barley base.” Internally, he says, they focus the narrative for their team on the opportunities for creativity that circularity can present. “Our general guiding principal is that we are proud of what we do — not sorry for what we don't.”

So how does this appear on the menu? “On our tasting menu, we always start with smaller courses that are regularly made from by-products from the larger dishes later on,” he explains. “We always aim to demonstrate circularity through the menu itself, avoiding talking about dishes or ingredients that guests are not able to see or taste during their experience.”

One example is De Vie’s oyster shell palate cleanser [pictured]. “Our second course is a French oyster with an apple and sorrel granita and a black pepper oil,” says Alex. “Once guests have finished their oyster, we serve an ice cold martini-style cocktail directly into the shell to cleanse their palate. The base of the martini is an oyster shell distillate made from the previous season's oysters infused into a white wine eau de vie. The purpose of all of this is to bring circularity to life for the guest.”

Other examples from our network

Read on for some more inspiration on how to reposition circularity and waste reduction in ways that improve the guest experience.

At Nén Danang, Summer Le redesigns dishes around the natural shapes of ingredients rather than trimming them to fixed templates, showing that uniqueness can be turned into a feature. Cuts that might have been overlooked become signature elements, adding little touches of luxury for every guest. As we saw above, tapered duck-breast ends are presented as a “chef’s extra bite, too good to waste”. Similarly, tiny local scallops, typically viewed by chefs as too small to be acceptable, are served as a jewel-like centrepiece wrapped in greens.
At Maroma, a Belmond Hotel, the team uses every last bit of pulp and peel when crafting their unique cocktails. “In our mixology lab, the bar team prepares house-made syrups, concentrates and extracts using different methods to ensure complete utilisation of each ingredient,” says Sustainability Manager Osvaldo Paez. One great example is their ‘Tomato Is a Fruit’ cocktail, designed to use every part of the tomato. “This perfectly embodies our circular approach to mixology.” 
In many countries, complimentary bread is both a cultural norm and a considerable source of waste. In Italy, another Belmond hotel reimagined the ritual as theatre rather than default: a warm bread trolley of premium loaves is brought to the table and slices are cut to order, with more offered only when requested. Waste fell sharply once this was introduced, while guests experienced more perceived quality, personal service and care.
At the Fish Bar at the JW Marriott Hong Kong, pulverised grouper bones are blended with gluten-free flour to create handcrafted Fish Bone Fettuccine, the restaurant’s in-demand signature dish — proving that items typically viewed as waste can create new value.
For hotels, replacing the notoriously wasteful buffet breakfast with cooked-to-order dishes means less food goes to waste while guests feel more looked after. “Cooking items like breakfast-buffet eggs on demand has improved quality, so our work to reduce waste has actually improved customer satisfaction,” explains Aurélie Sage, Accor’s CSR Project Director for Sofitel, MGallery and Emblems.
At K'U'UK Restaurante, a fine dining venue in Mexico, some plates are repositioned as ‘for sharing’ to reduce individual excess. “On our à la carte menu, for example, most starters are designed to be shared. This has significantly reduced plate waste while enhancing the dining experience,” says the restaurant’s Director, Eduardo Rukos. Eduardo’s team has even found a way to make doggy bags part of the luxury experience, reducing plate waste. “No matter how refined the restaurant is, guests can always take food with them. We offer elegant, well-designed takeaway options — these are even suitable for international diners returning to hotels without reheating facilities.”

Don’t miss our new global sustainability insights report, "Hospitality Rising: Global Challenges, Local Solutions”. Exploring the latest trends and influences shaping the sector, it’s packed with examples of smart sustainability initiatives from businesses of all shapes and sizes across the world. Download your copy here and start getting inspired!

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Head of Marketing & Communications

JOCELYN DOYLE

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Jocelyn leads our Marketing & Comms team and is responsible for growing our audience and solidifying our global reputation. Jocelyn holds a BSc in Hospitality Management and an MSc in Food Culture & Communications, and is a member of the Irish Food Writers’ Guild. Her background includes on-the-ground hospitality experience; over a decade of food writing, editing and publishing; bespoke content creation for some of Ireland’s biggest food brands; and developing the content strategy for a suite of menu management and carbon tracking software.