The Access Interview San Francisco
How Shuggie’s Has Battled Food Waste, One ‘Trash Pie’ at a Time
We’re pleased to present another installment of The Access Interview, a longform series where great chefs and restaurateurs discuss their work in depth. And you can discover their work yourself, as many of their restaurants offer exclusive access to qualified American Express cardmembers via Global Dining Access by Resy.
It would be easy to dismiss Shuggie’s Trash Pie and Natural Wine as the kind of place that could exist only in San Francisco. Sure, the two-year-old Mission District pizza spot made multiple best new restaurants lists in 2023, and was featured on NPR and the “Today” show, but the very concept — a menu built on upcycled food waste — begs to be derided as impractical hippie idealism.
The restaurant’s owners, Kayla Abe and David Murphy, insist otherwise. They argue that Shuggie’s isn’t a pie-in-the-sky experiment so much as a place that can serve as a model, in ways large and small, for the entire restaurant industry. “I think about that constantly,” says Murphy, Shuggie’s head chef.
Upcycling food waste, for those who may be unaware of the burgeoning movement, involves taking surplus ingredients that would be thrown out and repurposing them so that they’re suitable, even desirable, for human consumption. That may seem impractical at best, offputting at worst, but at Shuggie’s it’s a raison d’être that covers nearly everything that happens in and out of the kitchen. At farmers markets, Murphy and Abe will buy produce that’s bruised or blemished — the restaurant grew out of their previous venture, Ugly Pickle Co., which was exactly what it sounds like — or sometimes just a variety of fruit or vegetable that vendors can’t sell that day. Proteins for the menu are off-cut meats and parts of fish that are destined to be discarded. Even the pizza dough is a blend of whey and oat flour milled from the leftovers of oat milk processing.
Murphy and Abe are quick to point out that they’re not dumpster diving; rather, they’re talking to producers and figuring out inefficiencies in the system that lead to food going to waste, and making use of ingredients that would otherwise end up in said dumpster. Shuggie’s, in many ways, is simply a locavore restaurant with a less pristine shopping list.
“We’re meant to be kind of an extreme example of what it could be to utilize all the different types of waste from all different parts of the food system,” Abe says. “I do think that there are ways for people to bring it into their programs in a small way, but I think the knowledge is not there. We’re trying to share that.”
When they first began working on upcycled food, Murphy and Abe were focused on the issue of waste without even being aware of the broader environmental implications — which are, in fact, enormous. The food supply chain — everything from clearing land and raising cattle to packaging and shipping — accounts for about one-third of global emissions. What’s more, food waste (and between 30 and 40% of the food produced in the U.S. goes to waste) that ends up in landfills releases methane, a greenhouse gas that is perhaps even worse for the environment than carbon dioxide. In other words, this is important — although Shuggie’s has found a way to educate customers without being preachy. You could easily immerse yourself in the restaurant’s lime-green, disco-inferno aesthetic, or dig into menu items like That’s a Spicy Meatball without noting that the meatballs are made from beef hearts, and a sauce from cauliflower leaves. (We’ll get to those both in a moment.)
“We’re talking about a topic that’s pretty heavy — climate change, food waste, all those things,” Murphy says. “That’s a pretty doom-and-gloom topic for just a casual Tuesday night dinner out. So we were like, OK, well, let’s try to make the menu as fun as possible. Let’s do pizza. Everybody loves pizza.”
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And then there’s that borderline zany dining room, with its Technicolor walls, and waiters pouring orange wine from a porrón directly into customers’ mouths. So if the overriding ethos is about creating a space to demonstrate how restaurants can address a massive environmental problem, it is still very much a party. For their part, Murphy and Abe believe other restaurateurs will see what they’re doing and follow suit.
“I think eventually we’re going to get to the point where this becomes the new veganism, or a bigger version of a mainstream sustainability that people want to see on menus,” Abe says.
Abe and Murphy took a break from slinging trash pies to chat with Resy about the origins of their groundbreaking restaurant, how they’re continuing to move their program forward, and their hopes for the future of the industry.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
RESY: Shuggie’s grew out of your previous venture, the Ugly Pickle Co., which also involved upcycling produce that was going to waste. When did you realize that food waste was a real problem and decide you wanted to do something about it?
David Murphy: It’s notorious in any kitchen, really, especially the higher you go up the Michelin scale. There’s just a lot of waste. The thing that made me first notice, to where I was like, OK, well, I’ve got to do something about this, was going to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. These are folks that I’ve known, some of ’em, for 17, 18 years. They’ll tell you what’s going on, because farmers, they don’t have a lot of people to talk to. They start telling you about their woes, and they start telling you about what’s going on on the farm, and then, also, when they have slow days: What happens when they’re timing crops and picking crops and hauling stuff to the market, and then for whatever reason people just didn’t show up that day? Oftentimes, farmers would be like, Hey, you want these radishes? I’m like, I don’t really have a budget for ’em; I don’t really have anywhere to put this on the menu right now. And they’re like, No, just take them, use them for family meal, otherwise we’re just going to toss them. That was the first seed that was planted. It started just by wanting to help all the farmers that we loved.
Other chefs and restaurateurs must see the same thing — why do you think more people aren’t doing what you do?
Kayla Abe: There’s a mountain of things every restaurant has to do just to stay open, and I think it’s exhausting trying to add this investigative layer to what you do. It is a lot of back-end work talking to suppliers, seeing the farmers that we see every week and asking them what’s coming into season and what’s going to be wasted. And it’s a lot of social investment, just getting to know people around you in the food system. It has to be rooted in some semblance of community building.
But there are lots of other locavore restaurants who build their programs around farmers markets and local produce. What’s different about what you do?
Abe: I think what’s interesting is there’s such this mindset, and we hear this from so many of our chef friends, who are like, I have to go to the farmers market at 7 a.m. All the good stuff is going to be gone. It’s like, what do you mean “the good stuff”? It’s just that it’s not as picked over, but really, I mean, what does it matter? It is a little bit of extra processing on our side — say, if we’re getting bruised or blemished things, it does take extra care, versus perfectly symmetrical [fruit], or the perfect firmness in a stone fruit or something. So there is that, but I think that’s the challenge of a good chef and a solid team, is making it work with what you have. So, we end up showing up at the farmers market at noon, and we’re like, Well, what are you not going to sell for the rest of the day?
A big learning for me has been how every single business has waste in some form. People are so excited to share what they have.— Kayla Abe
Can you give me an example of a produce item that you look at differently?
Abe: Well, it’s tomato season, of course, and we didn’t realize this, but apparently for a lot of these farmers heirlooms are so much more popular than other types of tomatoes now. So they have a hard time moving other varieties. They can sell tons of heirlooms because those are, I don’t know, everyone talks about them. They’re cool. But then, now they have all these Juliets and Romas that they’re like, no one’s buying these. So we’re like, OK, we’ll take the boring original ones and put those on the menu.
Murphy: With tomatoes, it’s just about people’s buying habits. Farmers will plant a bunch of different things, not knowing what people are going to be going after this season, and inevitably there’s always a variety or two of tomatoes that are being overlooked that are not being purchased. So we say, Hey, what are the pain points around tomatoes right now? And they just say, Hey, take these.
Abe: Then it’s sometimes pushing them to sell us things that they don’t typically sell. Cauliflower leaves — it was a really big push to get people to sell them to us because the farmers were of the mind that they weren’t valuable, and why would you want those? There are things like that, where we’re trying to convince them to bring these things out for us, and it’s always a fight to convince them to let us pay them for [those items].
It’s not just produce, right? Your kitchen employs discarded or underused animal parts, such as, say, fish collars in the “Misc. Fish Dish” on the menu.
Murphy: So, unlike in Japan, where the collar is the sexiest part, here in the States, [fishmongers] have a lot of skeletons and collars and heads [left over]. I used to do a cool trout head or salmon head dish for a while — it’s all just based on what the mongers need to get rid of. We have a really cool fish partnership with this place called Royal Hawaiian Seafood, and they get what we’re trying to do.
Another example would be using beef hearts to make your meatballs.
Murphy: It’s another one of those things — organs. You just have to reeducate people and say, Hey, this is what we used to do about a hundred years ago. Let’s get back to that, before the advent of all this mass manufacturing and factory farming and stuff. It’s making sure that we are utilizing the whole animal, and that it’s not going to things like animal feed. Kayla’s on the board of the Upcycled Foods Association. The definition for them of an upcycle, partially, is making sure that food goes to its highest use, meaning highest up on the food chain. We’re overproducing food, and a lot of it just gets milled up and tossed into feed for animals. The more food that you can give to humans, the less that needs to be produced, and therefore less effects on climate and all that stuff.
What are other places where you’re finding ingredients that might otherwise go to waste?
Abe: What has been interesting is talking with different retail consumer packaged food companies that have excess product, or a run of something that was off in a way, or they have surplus because of retail. We recently brought in Matriark. They happen to be an upcycled food company as well, but they had a pallet of tomato sauce that was rejected by Sysco because the boxes were slightly caved in on one side, so they were going to send them to the dump. I mean, it’s ridiculous. It’s a cosmetic imperfection on the packaging, not even the food product. We’re also working on a project right now with Patagonia Provisions, bringing in a run of their sardines that were too salty. They aren’t quite right for retail sale, but we can always fix that on the back end, in the kitchen.
Aside from the ingredients you’re acquiring, what do you do to limit your own kitchen waste?
Abe: Dough is one that we’ve really been struggling with, because there’s always leftover pizza dough. Garlic knots are one thing [we do]. We now make a crumble for desserts. We make it into these big flat chips, kind of like pita chips, that we fry up. And very soon we’re going to introduce a pasta to the menu.
Murphy: I’ve been making these noodles out of our leftover pizza dough, and they’re just ridiculous. They have this texture of a Chinese hand-pulled noodle — that little bounce and that little stretch to it. We sheet them out, and we’re going to be doing, I think, a white lasagna with a ton of onions, but then we’re going to mount it with this really beautiful wild boar ragù on top.
What else?
Murphy: I think we just have to retrain ourselves as chefs to think about, what is waste? How can this go to a greater good on a menu? I think a lot of chefs do that. Some of the building blocks of what being a chef is is that you utilize all these things, but there are ways besides just creating a stock. What do you do with all the leftover stuff from a stock? Well, the next step to that, if you’re thinking about this, is you take all of the remnants besides the bones, and you spin that down in a Robot Coupe, and then you dehydrate that and create a powder that can just be, like, this killer little seasoning. There’s just layers upon layers of things to do in a kitchen. I think every single chef needs a dehydrator, or three, or five, in his kitchen, just to make sure that you can utilize more. If you keep thinking about the derivatives and keep trying to build layers to your cuisine, that’s what truly makes a great chef.
Does your business model make your menu-planning and day-to-day operations more challenging?
Abe: The way we’ve built the menu is, there are different pockets where we are slotting things in. We’re flexible. We always have a slot on our menu for any type of wilty green at the end of the farmers market — it could be anything that they have that’s been sitting out over the course of the day, and they aren’t going to be able to sell it at any future markets. Then there are some other buckets, even for pizzas, where any type of root vegetable will work, [because] we’ll be roasting it up. We’ve built it in a way that we can swap things in and out. We’re not changing the menus every single day — and I think that’s a big question or criticism, sometimes, from people that come in. They’re like, Well, how could it be upcycled? Or, How could it be trash stuff if the menu stays the same? And it’s because we’re making micro changes every single day.
What are some of the impacts you’ve seen since Shuggie’s opened?
Abe: Even just this one restaurant, we’ve already saved over 90,000 pounds of food from going to waste in the two and a half years that we’ve been open. We see the financial benefit going back to the farmers as well. And I think there’s so many rewarding milestones along this journey where we see it working on a local level. What’s been cool is seeing other businesses now come to us and say, Can you take these? In the beginning, it was really us just trying to piece all of these things together, whereas now we have, whether it’s distributors or food manufacturers or random CPG companies, [businesses] coming to us saying, We have things that we need to offload, and we never even considered that they could go somewhere else. They were kind of just headed for the dump. I think a big learning for me has been how every single business has waste in some form. People are so excited to share what they have.
Ultimately, are you optimistic other restaurants are going to begin to apply aspects of your model?
Murphy: Yeah, absolutely. There’s people all over Europe that are doing food-waste restaurants now. I think this is the next thing. I feel like we shouldn’t have to have food-waste restaurants — it should just be, we all just start thinking differently about food. Once we start utilizing more and more of this stuff, it stops becoming chic, and it just becomes adopted. But that has to start with chefs. I think if chefs do it, everybody else will adopt it too.
Abe: I guess I’m just excited that other places might be interested in what we’re doing, and I really hope to formalize some of the things that we do to create something that’s easily digestible for other businesses to take on. Because even if we are the kind of way-out-there example, there’s so many ways for other businesses to incorporate a little bit of this thinking into what they do, whether that’s repurposing things in their own kitchen and being mindful of their own waste, or what we do, which is more of taking in other people’s waste and figuring out what to do with it. It’s a fun, creative exercise. It pushes you and your team. You see immediate benefit for your community. I think there are a lot of positives.
