Sin bins Mexican restaurant on a zero-waste mission

Sourcing local produce and using pre-Hispanic agricultural techniques, Baldío has embraced a regenerative ethos - with delicious results

- Imogen Lepere

Hunched over the pass in the open restaurant kitchen, a team of chefs are dusting ceviche with a powder made from lime skins that would, in most cases, have been thrown away.

The Mexico City restaurant where they work looks like most restaurant kitchens but it lacks one key element: there is no bin.

Baldío was co-founded by brothers Lucio and Pablo Usobiaga and chef Doug McMaster, best known for his zero-waste spot Silo London. “In my eyes, bins are coffins for things that have been badly designed,” said McMaster. “If there was a trophy for negligence, it would be bin-shaped.”

The food, which recently earned a Michelin green star, is creative but still quintessentially Mexican: squash tostada with guaca-broccoli, maguey flower, maguey worm, or grass-fed pork from Veracruz with tamarind mole, served with chinampa greens and house-made kimchi. Significant planning is needed from sourcing to preparation, and the founders are also behind Arca Tierra, a regenerative agriculture project that includes a network of 50 farmers in central Mexico as well as the organisation’s own farm in the pre-Aztec canal system at Xochimilco, in the south of Mexico City.

“Restaurants can have a big environmental impact but they also have a big reach,” says Lucio Usobiaga. “We want Baldío to be a model that shows it’s possible to be both zero waste and to rely on farmers rather than supermarkets.”