Conscious Cuisine: Experience More Sustainable Dining
Conscious cuisine:
experience more sustainable dining
In the midst of the current Anthropocene, each human on this Earth is being collectively called to make changes. To ensure the future of our planet, a shift towards a more consciously contributive approach is underway - encompassing lifestyles, needs and responsibilities.
Within our shared humanity, we are seeing that as we become more and more interconnected through technology, we can make similar impacts on one another in the physical world too.
And while we experience this shift, what may seem to have the least ramifications, can actually have the most. One of the most significant impacts that we can make is with our food choice, and the far-reaching repercussions that it has. Known to be one of the most effective shifts to make in one’s diet is the plant-based, vegetarian or vegan options.
One of the most significant impacts that we can make is with our food choice, and the far-reaching repercussions that it has.
Christian G. Mongendre is someone who is more than aware of the impacts that one’s diet can have. As the chef and owner of Treehouse and other plant-based businesses in Hong Kong, his journey with food started at a young age, living close to his food sources on a farm in France.
Photo from Treehouse
From there, he experimented with his dietary regime to optimize his performance as a high-level rower - finding that a plant-based approach worked best. Following this, in an aim to help his ill mother, he studied at the famous Institute Paul Bocuse, with a double major in Culinary Arts and International Hotel & Restaurant Management - where he also interned for Michelin three-star, Chef Alain Ducasse.
Christian’s attention to pure, healthy, energetic, consciousness-raising food and living is instilled in every aspect of the restaurants and concepts he runs and works with. Everything, from their eco-friendly design to the carefully curated menus, to the selection of each ingredient - is done with integrity and with intense attention to detail.
Photo from Treehouse
From there, he experimented with his dietary regime to optimize his performance as a high-level rower - finding that a plant-based approach worked best. Following this, in an aim to help his ill mother, he studied at the famous Institute Paul Bocuse, with a double major in Culinary Arts and International Hotel & Restaurant Management - where he also interned for Michelin three-star, Chef Alain Ducasse.
Christian’s attention to pure, healthy, energetic, consciousness-raising food and living is instilled in every aspect of the restaurants and concepts he runs and works with. Everything, from their eco-friendly design to the carefully curated menus, to the selection of each ingredient - is done with integrity and with intense attention to detail.
From his varied experience, and as a result of his personal beliefs, his latest restaurant venture, Treehouse, was born in 2019. Christian specifically developed Treehouse in Hong Kong as a catalyst for mindful eating and sustainability -- to contribute to heartfully connecting us with each other -- and with this beautiful planet. His philosophy centres around offering better food and lifestyle options -- not merely highlighting the negative; he is fully focused on building the new. He believes passionately that, “To end the global health crisis, the food & beverage industry needs a major paradigm shift. As restaurateurs, our responsibility is to serve the highest quality nutritious food. Creating an ethical business model -- with sustainability built-in is also crucially important. A plant-based diet brings one into ecological harmony with our environment. It is a necessary element of a major planetary shift in consciousness.”
“To end the global health crisis, the food & beverage industry needs a major paradigm shift. As restaurateurs, our responsibility is to serve the highest quality nutritious food..."
Treehouse opened for business in Hong Kong in October of 2019. The initial Treehouse Flagship location, at H Code, Pottinger Street, Central, has now been joined by Treehouse at BaseHall, Jardine House, Central – and by a steadily expanding food delivery service. Treehouse serves colorful, delicious whole-food plant-based dishes, which are all accidentally-plant-based. Two vegetarian items are offered as substitute ingredients, for customers who prefer them. Among the must-have offerings are the Treehouse Flatbreads. Made with wholewheat sourdough - to be easily digestible - you are invited to create your own flavor combinations.
Image via Treehouse
The mouth-watering base options include zesty, floral tones (think wild thyme, sumac, paprika, cumin, cayenne, sesame seeds and sea salt) or mild and herby notes (with oregano instead.) Fill it with your choice of toppings - ranging from charred cauliflower to ratatouille, roasted garlic hummus to kelp noodles, and more. Splash on a sauce from a selection including cashew, miso, amba, tahini, among others. Add in a nutritious kick from their selection of blends, including one with toasted sunflower, pumpkin, sesame seeds, with cranberries and goji berries - or an Umami Blend of shiitake, thyme, garlic and onion - and you’ll be all set!
What’s even better is that for every combo that is purchased, a tree is donated. So as you are munching on your feel-good food, you know that your carbon-footprint is being further off-set, making even more of a positive contribution to the planet.
Images from Treehouse
Treehouse opened at the peak of the 2019 social unrest in Hong Kong, yet, under the guidance of this passionate gastronomic expert, it is navigating the unsettled times with a sense of purpose and integrity.
To Christian, food is about connection, about collaboration, and above all, about love. “To me, cooking a meal for yourself is kind of sacred — by preparing and handling your own food, you connect with what you are consuming for your body… the next best thing is someone you love cooking for you.”
"cooking is one of the most refined and complete arts." - Pietro Leemann
As a plant-based Michellin Star option, Joia restaurant’sChef and owner, Pietro Leemann, considers cooking to be one of the most refined and complete arts - involving all the senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. In 1989, working with Gualtiero Marchesi, Leemann would organize banquets for Bulgari around the world. Since then, his focus is now on natural food, which is avant-garde, experimental, skilfully prepared, and beautifully presented. At Joia, the art of the table not only nourishes the body but also the mind and spirit, and the restaurant, therefore, becomes a little oasis. Leemann strives to "revive nature on the plate."
Image of "Di Non Solo Pane" by Chef Pietro Leemann
His High Vegetarian Cuisine includes dishes such as “Le Mie Dolci Verdure” (My Sweet Vegetables), an arrangement of selected vegetables, delicately syruped with white chocolate and honey mousse, plated next to vanilla ice cream with sea-skin sauce from the forest close to his location. Ingredients such as chestnut honey, Tahitian vanilla and sea-buckthorn juice ensure that the flavors dance on the pallet. If more savory flavors are to your liking, his “Di Non Solo Pane” take on a Panzanella (a Tuscan chopped salad), involves a selection of crunchy vegetables surrounding a heart of wasabi-scented cannellini beans, with a refreshing contrast of basil and raspberry.
With his team from Joia, they have designed and built a synergetic agricultural garden at Cascina Caremma in Besate. This garden uses an agricultural style theorized by the Japanese philosopher and agronomist Masanoby Fukuoka and developed by Emilia Hazelip.
Weekly, the Joia team, under the guise of farmer-chefs, go to cultivate and collect their food supplies, an extraordinary experience for everyone - one which ensures that the source of their ingredients is preserved.
Image of "Le mie dolci verdure" by Chef Pietro Leemann
“For the first time, when I became a vegetarian, I understood that it is the evolution of food - towards oneself and towards the planet,” shares Leeman. His philosophy lies in that “The key to a kitchen for well-being is basically very simple; cooking with love the ingredients of the season and the place where we live respecting them. Indeed, food, cooked with all the attention and offered, will become true nectar and an inexhaustible source of pleasure.”
However, should you find yourself with an insatiable meaty appetite, then choosing meat that has been responsibly sourced, and is made use of fully, is the next best option.
Featured on Netflix’s “Down To Earth with Zac Efron”, Dill Restaurant in Reykjavik, Iceland, caters to those with a more carnivorous pallet. Founded in 2009 with the aim of delivering a unique and memorable experience of the vast and multi-faceted Icelandic countryside, Dill actively seeks out and explores new methods and preparations of the land’s native ingredients. Gunnar Karl Gíslasson, the founding chef at the helm, aims to deliver a procession of dishes that one might say is as predictable as the Icelandic weather.
Image via Dill Restaurant
Plated on hand-thrown custom made tableware by local ceramic artist, Guðbjörg Káradóttir, this Michelin starred restaurant uses traditional Icelandic methods alongside modern techniques to produce a multi-course menu of creative, diminutive dishes served and explained by the chefs themselves. Wanting to pay respect to each and every morsel of the raw ingredients, Dill utilizes everything. An example of this is Dill’s vegetable trimming consommé infused with dehydrated mushrooms and seaweed. At the end of their service, when the grill is still warm and smoky, all of their vegetable trimmings, skin and peels are placed on the top shelf of the grill where it caramelizes throughout the whole night. The following morning, the consommé is made. Prior to service, it is seasoned with kombu and dehydrated mushroom before serving it with oil made from horseradish peel.
We are what we eat, and we become what we choose to eat.
In the words of Pietro Leemann, “We are what we eat, and we become what we choose to eat.” It then becomes of utmost importance to choose suitable foods as nourishment for the physical and energetic body, for the psyche, and for the soul. Indeed, if we learn to eat well, and become more connected to our food sources, we can learn to work closely with nature, enhancing it in a more harmonious relationship.
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