Upscale restaurants abandon bottled water

Sun Seeker, originally uploaded by Big-E-Mr-G.

 

Upscale restaurants, including Chez Panisse in Berkeley, are abandoning bottled water in favor of more environmentally-friendly in-house filtration and carbonation systems. [AP]

Comments

[mudkitty]

It's a good thing...too much plastic. Talk about melamine.

[Hawise]

It is generally cheaper and safer as well, as long as they change the filters regularly.

[Anacher Forester]

If it were any place else than Cali, I'd be surprised. It's a long time trend there. I remember going to a new upscale LA sushi joint in the late '90s. My boss ordered bottled water. The waitress proudly said that was not necessary as they boasted a $2500 water purifier/filtration system. I remember we laughed about it at the time because it was so uncommon or because we were stoned. Or Both.

Bottled water is by far the most profitable beverage for restauranteurs due to it's high mark up. Some restaurants place fancy bottles of imported water (S. Pellegrino, etc.) on the tables before you're seated and/or have the waitstaff push it fairly aggressively. The price is never listed or mentioned and asking the price of bottled water at an upscale restaurant is considered gauche. If your dinner party is ten or more your tab for water alone will easily top $50 -- a shocker whether dinner's on an expense account or not.

Many hotels do the same thing strategically placing imported bottled water in their rooms.

AF

Malkin and her ilk have grown both fat and crafty suckling at the teat of Rove.

[revenantive]

This is great news for the water filtration industry.

Plus, all of the glass that companies like evian use to bottle their products could be put to efficient environmentally sound use either as building material or for wine making. Nothing bothered me more as a bartender than watching all of those glass bottles laying around after a shift. Here in the midwest, the concept of recycling & economical use of energy and resources is still slow to catch on.

I wonder how this will affect local beverage distributors who supply bottled water to restaurants. Somewhere along the water or glass bottling industry food chain more than a few company's marketing manager are throwing a temper tantrum with this kind of broad industry shift.

So long as the water is drinkable, I don't care it's sourcing or presentation. h2o is just h2o. I find it hard to believe that one person's water is better than another's.

In my view, the bottled water industry operates like a giant corporate pissing contest. Nearly the same could be said of nearly the entire corporate beverage industry.

Some of it, however, is good to drink so perhaps I shouldn't complain all that much. I have been known to imbibe a beverage or two that I know are bad for both my health & the health of my fellow earthly inhabitants.

But depending on the hygiene level of the restaurant and it's location, bottled water may be a good idea...

'aqua con gas'

[Njorl]

Expensive water is such a silly idea. NYC tap water beats most bottled water in taste tests. Granted, most cities don't have water as good as NY, but they probably could.

The idea of importing water is insane. It isn't complicated stuff. You can do a chemical analysis and duplicate it easily. It isn't wine. It isn't even beer. There is no magic process in the bowels of the Earth or on a mountain top that makes the water taste just so.

People will always be willing to pay for the opportunity to spend more. The most popular consumer item in this country is the price tag.

[glennrwordman]

Lindsay--sorry to go through the comments, but I tried to e-mail you about the Saturday shoot, and yr. e-mail was full.

Can you reach out to me abt. Saturday?

Glenn

[akugel]

This is huge. Great find.

[Alon Levy]

Yeah, New York water is good, but Columbia'd pipelines suck, which means I have to let the water run for a minute before drinking just to make it drinkable. That, or trek to the nearest bar and be the only person around drinking water.

[mudkitty]

Ah...NY tap water. When I was a kid, it was sooooo delicious. I mean that.

[Ginger Yellow]

What's wrong with tap water? I never ask for bottled water in a restaurant; it just seems so pointless.

[Anacher Forester]

I was quite spoiled growing up in Boston. Our tap water came straight from the Quabbin Resevoir. It's easily the best tap water of any metropolitan area in the US. I pine for that water. I now live 60 miles outside of NYC in NY state and the water here is horrible. Tastes funky and is full of lime. Later this Spring I hope to install a home water purification system because just having a PUR water filter on the kitchen faucet isn't cutting it. Anyone have any recommendations for home water purification systems?

AF

Malkin and her ilk have grown both fat and crafty suckling at the teat of Rove.

[superdude]

I would be surprised if Chez Panisse ever served bottled water imported from far away. Their entire reason for being, I thought, was to evangelize the importance of very fresh, very local ingredients grown sustainably by small farmers. But maybe they were focusing on the quality of the ingredients rather than on other aspects of sustainability--and bottled water doesn't seem to suffer from the trip as much as fresh greens. They've been around since the '70s, after all, and a few years ago I doubt many people even thought about how wasteful it was to import water from Fiji.

[superdude]

Putting in a filtration system is kind of silly though. Won't it destroy the terroir of the Berkeley tap water?

[Damien]

What's wrong with tap water? Depends where you live! LA has some nasty tasting stuff. I actually didn't mind much while I was going to college in Pasadena (which actually has its own water supply, thanks to a pseudopod up into the mountains) but when I moved to San Francisco and then visited LA I could tell the difference. In Indiana, Bloomington water seems good but the samples I've had in Indianapolis have been alarming.

[janet]

One amusing thing about Chez Panisse serving tap water, as various people have pointed out, is that the name of the local water company is the East Bay Municipal Utilities District, affectionately known as EBMUD. Most of EBMUD's water comes from Sierra snowmelt (an environmental concern in itself, but then, that's true of all water in CA), and it tastes pretty good even before filtration.

Bay Wolf, an Oakland restaurant with a pedigree similar to Chez Panisse's, but inexplicably less famous even though the food is just as good, has been serving filtered tap water for 25 years.

[bloix]

NY water really is good. If you go to the Catskills, you'll notice the huge reservoirs - damned lakes, really - where the local people aren't permitted to swim, boat or fish. That's to keep up the high quality of the NY water.

On the other hand, the tap water in Washington DC and many other places comes from rivers, which are not nearly as clean as reservoirs, so the water has to be chlorinated. Chorinated water has a taste. If you care about wine, chlorinated water will put your palate off. It's serious enough that I notice it, and a friend who is more sensitive than I am once complained that a high-end DC restaurant "smells like a swimming pool." If you're paying 75 bucks or more for a bottle of wine, you don't want to ruin your sense of taste and smell with a nice tall glass of chorinated water.

[bloix]

NY water really is good. If you go to the Catskills, you'll notice the huge reservoirs - damned lakes, really - where the local people aren't permitted to swim, boat or fish. That's to keep up the high quality of the NY water.

On the other hand, the tap water in Washington DC and many other places comes from rivers, which are not nearly as clean as reservoirs, so the water has to be chlorinated. Chorinated water has a taste. If you care about wine, chlorinated water will put your palate off. It's serious enough that I notice it, and a friend who is more sensitive than I am once complained that a high-end DC restaurant "smells like a swimming pool." If you're paying 75 bucks or more for a bottle of wine, you don't want to ruin your sense of taste and smell with a nice tall glass of chorinated water.

[Matt McIrvin]

I grew up in the DC suburbs and thought of that swimming-pool taste as the way water was supposed to taste, to the point of finding less-chlorinated water slightly disturbing, but that was a while ago. My parents still make coffee with the stuff--really weak coffee--and to me, the coffee barely cuts through the taste of the chlorine.

The tap water here isn't that bad, to me, but we also use a Brita filter; it works pretty well.

[Scott Armstrong]

That's spelled 'Berkeley' with three e's. :-)

[anon]

Alice Waters is an amazing individual. A true feminist. A true progressive. Sheer genius.

Bay Wolf is a Chez Panisse wanna be stocked with Chez Panisse castoffs.

Los Angeles Water actually wins awards for its taste. Plus, it is unfluoridated! (Or used to be.)

Can someone name a prominent self-identifying feminist blogger that likes her bottle watered so much that she dissed this idea today? What a wanker among feminists. Mainly she's just an authoritarian narcissist.

Yes, Amanda Marcotte wonders aloud if this is a dumb idea.

http://pandagon.net/2007/04/04/extremely-lazy-posting

Narcissist.

[stewart]

I'm not quite as disturbed by in-house filtration as I am by widespread bottled water, but nearly. It's still a partial withdrawal from the common good, like private police for a specific neighbourhood. Does it reduce the pressure for clean, safe,appropriately treated water and good delivery systems? I've had great tapwater (Vancouver), bad tapwater (Adelaide) and minimally drinkable (Roswell), depending on local conditions, but the best way to ensure the water is safe is to clarify that it is a accepted as a common resource. If some people want to go beyond safe and up to good-tasting, even better. Financially, it makes more sense to do it for all than have everyone buy a filtration/cleaning system on their own.

[Molly, NYC]

Expensive water is such a silly idea. NYC tap water beats most bottled water in taste tests.

Njorl - I agree that expensive water is a silly idea, but the taste of even NYC tap water is considerably improved by those Brita things (if you'll forgive the plug of a commercial product). I got one last year (it's this carafe arrangement that you keep in the fridge), and my water consumption has gone way up. And it's 'way cheaper than bottled water. I imagine they use something similar (but bigger) at Chez Panisse.

[pg]

I agree with Molly. This was a great decision by the upscale restaurants.

[water purifier]

Waters clear liquid form and general abundance/availability has made it easy for us to take it for granted. If it turned black when not alive we wouldn’t touch it. It doesn’t, so we continue to drink it without question. It is encouraging to see this attitude changing when it comes to the benefits of drinking water. Lets hope that over time this will foster greater action on a global water to honor water and therefore ourselves.