Eat dishes (literally) at downtown Budapest’s new Bistro No Waste

As much as we love restaurants and cafés, these businesses are notorious for producing piles of polluting waste, especially at places that serve food on disposable plates to be eaten with plastic utensils. In an attempt to help reduce the mountains of trash created by eco-unfriendly eateries, Hungarian restaurateur Zsuzsanna Keve decided to create a Budapest bistro that is almost entirely waste-free – made possible by serving food on edible plates, which is provided with biodegradable cutlery, too. We recently visited Zsuzsanna’s small Ráday Street eatery, the newly opened Bistro No Waste.

Zsuzsanna Keve originally trained to become a professional fencer, but she gave up the sport after a car accident, and has been working in the tourism industry for 36 years now. She was a hotel manager, she owned a travel agency, she opened restaurants, and she does event organizing to this very day. Her new 25-square-meter bistro has two small tables and a similarly tiny kitchen, so for now it operates primarily as a “showroom” for Zsuzsanna’s novel concept, offering an extremely eco-friendly lunch menu and “No Waste Bites” (990 HUF).

Photo: Hartyányi Norbert - We Love Budapest

Our lunch, Jókai bean soup and bread pudding, was served on plates made from wheat bran and water. The plates, ordered from Belgium and Poland, are made in industrial environments with press machines, and their inner surface is shiny because of a heat treatment that allows them to retain liquid for 2-3 hours. We can bake bread in them, and put them in the freezer or the microwave – although at Bistro No Waste, there’s no microwave, deep fryer, or palm oil to be found. Their cleaning products are environmentally friendly, and the credit-card reader gives no paper receipt (those who want a receipt can have it sent to their e-mail address). The entire place produces only 3-4 liters of trash each day, excluding what can be composted.

Some guests thought that the plates were papier mache, but others were glad to break parts of their bowl into their soup, or bring the dishes home for their pet hamsters. In our opinion, the edible dishes have no particular taste, so munching on them isn’t much of an experience – but on the bright side, they don’t affect the taste of the food in any way. Moreover, the plates are also a great composting material, as they break down completely in just 30 days. The wheat bran and PLA-based knives and forks, while not edible, take about the same amount of time to decompose. The spoons are made from sugar cane to better withstand the hot soups, but are also biodegradable, and are made by the same Hungarian company that supplies the bistro with compostable takeaway containers. However, there’s one thing Zsuzsa couldn’t obtain in an environmentally friendly version: cups. Although biodegradable cups exist, the American market uses up everything they produce, so there’s nothing left to export – the same is true for the edible spoons from India.The tiny containers that the “No Waste Bites” are served in proved to be lighter snacks than the plates. In these, we received granola, salty and sweet porridge, tasters with liver paté and onions, and chocolate ganache.

Other meals planned for the near future at Bistro No Waste are hot apple soup, hunter-style chicken on a bed of polenta, and tiramisu, as well as French onion soup, turnip cabbage stew with meatballs, and Sacher torte. A two-course lunch menu costs 990 forints, while a three-course menu is 1,190 forints. The ingredients come from Hungarian organic farms and small producers, although most of them are pre-prepared due to the size of the current kitchen, which will change with the construction of an additional rear kitchen. The menu will be expanded, and from spring, the terrace will open, as well. Zsuzsa’s main goal, however, is to promote the edible plates and biodegradable cutlery for events, festivals, and beach buffets, as these produce the largest amount of plastic waste.