Sustainable practices at Vandal
Some of the things we’re doing here at Vandal to make our little corner of the earth a better place…
Solar Panels & Batteries.
We have installed 84 solar panels with 6 big-ass batteries to store our energy.
We off the electrical grid son!!!!
Even though it doesn’t cost us anything, we have a “no lights in the kitchen at night” policy in place [except for our heat lamps] so we saving our energy for important things like refrigeration. It might look like a vigil, but sometimes we cook by candlelight at night
All of our food preparation is done in electric ovens running off of our solar energy
Root to Shoot
We waste bugger-all-nothing
Let me give you an example from the kitchen - our most used herb (in cooking that is) is coriander.
Firstly, and you’ll find this in another section - we buy from local growers in Sydney literally twenty minutes away from Vandal
Secondly, we use the whole plant - top to bottom - zero waste.
We pull the leaves for garnish (all the green stuff on your taco), we use the stems for salsa’s (to add crunch) and the roots - we either dehydrate them into a powder or bash em down in a mortar and pestle and use the roots either in our salsa bases or stock pots to make the base flavours of all our tasty dishes - and if there’s anything left after all that - it goes into our compost bin out back of the restaurant. Worms love coriander - who knew?
Another example of root to shoot - is using every part of the mighty Cauliflower.
Firstly, we clean the cauli’ and break it into three parts, the flower, the stems and the leaves.
1. The flowers are roasted and then served in the cauliflower taco
2. The stems are roasted and blended to make a puree for the base of the cauliflower taco.
3. The leaves are also roasted and blended with the puree, however quite a few of these bad boys are added to the taco for a nice little crunch and to add a smoky flavour to our humble cauliflower taco
Compost.
Thats right - we compost - and either use it at our family property in Bilpin or donate it to a local community garden.
We’ll be opening up our compost soon for local green thumbs in the community to collect - stay tuned!!!
Used Cooking Oil.
Our used up cooking oil heads to recycling, where it's turned into bio-fuel. Amazing right?! What a time to be alive
Glass Bottles.
All our glass bottles either get repurposed (see our range of pre-batched Margaritas available for sale on our take away / pickup menu) or they are crushed and then recycled and made into new bottles
Water Catchment.
We’ve basically stuck a big ole bucket up on the roof to catch water that we use to water our indoor plants - small thing but why the f*ck not right? Even indoor plants need to feel the rain 😂
Suppliers.
Whilst we can’t exclusively use local suppliers - we do love partnering with suppliers who are using sustainable practices and have a social conscience - Examples of our biggest used food items are coriander and corn chips / soft shell tortillas for taco’s.
All coriander used at Vandal is from local Sydney growers that are within 10km of our restaurant.
All our tortillas / corn totopos are made by a small family operated business who grow their own corn, and give us their non-GMO organic corn chips and tortillas produced from their family run farm up in the Byron Bay Hinterland - and they manufacture all their products on Solar.
Recycled Paper.
The paper we print our menus on, our napkins, the toilet paper we use and even our ink cartridges are all recycled products.
Our Furniture.
All furniture is second (sometimes third and fourth) hand. All our chairs and stools were used in previous restaurants - and we’re using them here - we put a bit of a spray paint on them and boom - brand new trendy ‘designer’ chairs.
Our table bases were previous purchases that were never used - and our table tops are from an old abandoned restaurant that surprisingly we got a lot of useful stuff out of.
Our waiters stations is an old library card holder dating back to war times (dewey decimal system in full effect) - we repurposed it and put our cutlery and napkins in it - (it’s pretty cool and if you wanna check it out it’s next to our kitchen - there’s a Rhianna sticker on it with rhi-rhi giving the middle finger with the caption f* you! 😂).
Our larger oval shaped dining table was bought third hand in 2009 and was the main dining table in a renowned Sydney Tapas bar for 7 years. For its fourth incarnation, our resident Vandal, Artist Arnie Arnold purpose painted it for our venue here in Newtown and now its a feature to match the back room of the venue.