A Look Inside the World’s First Sustainable Sushi Restaurant

Bamboo Sushi brings hard-core sustainability to the Bay Area’s food scene

Thomas Smith
The Startup
Published in
8 min readDec 4, 2019

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Credit: Gado Images

In the Bay Area’s food scene, sustainability is sacred.

Our region has enthusiastically embraced all manner of eco-friendly food measures, including banning nearly all single-use plastics. And we’ve done it with vigor —under a law proposed in 2018, California waiters could go to jail for giving patrons plastic drinking straws.

It’s the only place where I’ve seen someone leave a one-star review on a restaurant's Yelp page that read, in essence, “The food and experience was great. But I can only leave one star, because the carry-out packaging was not plant-based.”

And we start young, too. My two year old’s preschool has already taught him the minutiae of proper solid waste disposal — he can sort recyclables from green waste more effectively than most big people.

For restaurants in the Bay Area, then, distinguishing yourself based on sustainability is a tough sell. Most patrons would shrug at such surface level niceties as corn-derived packaging and locally grown ingredients — “Sure, that’s great. But even our local McDonald’s does that.”

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