Dining in the drought - 'pasta la vista‚ baby'

Pasta and boiled vegetables are disappearing from some menus as restaurants do their bit to save every drop of water in drought-ravaged Cape Town.

Residents and businesses are experimenting with various solutions to cut down their consumption of water as city authorities warn of a looming “Day Zero” crisis.

Many of the city’s restaurants are saving water while still serving the best possible meals to their customers.

Staff at Pane E Vino Food and Wine Bar in Stellenbosch are encouraged to bring their own drinking water from home.

“We reuse most of our water. The water we use to cook our spinach is reused to wash our dishes with‚ we use the water that we wash our cutlery with for our garden‚” said head of the kitchen Akihirah Erasmus.

“We try to bring our own drinking water from home. We try our best to save water where we can. Pasta is really popular on our menu and it uses a lot of water to make it so we reuse that water for our dishes or the garden.”

Over in Newlands‚ the Vineyard Hotel has discarded pasta meals from the menus at their restaurants and patrons can no longer order boiled vegetables. Executive chief Carl Van Rooyen said different cooking techniques had been implemented to save water.

“We don’t boil anymore we steam. We have taken pasta off our dinner menu‚” he said. Water used to wash vegetables was transferred to 200 litre drums and stored for other uses. “No more boiling of anything‚ it is all steaming and frying and deep frying and shallow frying‚” said Van Rooyen.

David Haupt‚ owner at A Tavola‚ an Italian restaurant in Claremont‚ said water from their ice buckets was reused to mop the floors.

“We’re doing what we can. At the end of the day we do what we do until we no longer can. The problem is not with us it is with the gross mismanagement of our water system. Until we learn to address that it would be silly of us in trying to save 10 litres here and 20 litres there. All the water we use in terms of our ice buckets gets reused. We use it to mop our floors. As I implement various things‚ my staff is also becoming more aware but for the vast majority of people the message is not going through‚” said Haupt.

Villa 47 Restaurant in the city centre has introduced water saving devices on their taps. “We use 25 litre water containers to catch the overflow from the ice machines and the ice wells.

We are catching all the water from the ice machines and the aircons and we use those for the washing of floors. We don’t make use of table cloths and we use paper napkins only‚” said operations manager Peter Douglas.

Carne‚ an Italian restaurant‚ is using a variety of paper and cloth napkins to cut down on laundry.

“The menu has nothing to do with water consumption. Carne means meat in Italian so we serve meat mainly. Our meat is grilled entirely. We changed how we look after water in our restaurant. We recycle with the ice bucket and water from washing vegetables‚” said partner Günter Boisits.