At RE (pronounced “ree”), practically every part a visitor touches is produced from a recycled materials or byproduct. Scale back, reuse and recycle are on the core of the Sydney bar’s ethos, embodied by every part from the mycelium lampshades and banquet seating produced from pineapple leaf fibers, to the “flawed” Maison Balzac glassware seconds and the bar prime produced from recycled milk bottles. It’s a philosophy that’s threaded not solely all through the venue’s beautiful design, however into the meals and cocktails as properly.
“RE is housed inside an previous heritage-listed website,” says Matt Whiley, proprietor and operator of the bar. “So in the identical manner that we’ve breathed life into the historic house we’re working inside through the use of recycled or reused supplies, we needed to reflect that with previous produce and objects that we serve.”
The present cocktail menu lists an array of drinks named after native companies and the excess components that RE salvages from them. The Margarita-adjacent cocktail, named “Ricos Tacos – Extra Taco Masa,” for instance, is made with leftover masa (corn flour) from Ricos Tacos, an area Mexican restaurant, to make a tortilla-flavored syrup.
For the upcoming menu, Whiley and his workforce have maintained a dedication to closing the loop on meals waste, this time by way of a cocktail referred to as Again to Black. “We actually needed to deal with how one can take a chunk of produce and switch it into one thing else through the use of time,” says Whiley, who conceptualized the drink round blackening components. The method makes use of low warmth over the course of a number of weeks to enzymatically darken meals, as a solution to breathe new life into in any other case wasted merchandise whereas concurrently drawing out caramelized taste from the identical components.
The savory, fruity highball is made with three core parts: blackened pumpkin distillate, lacto koji soda and blackened banana syrup. First, the RE workforce creates a base distillate with the pumpkin “brains”—the stringy components of the fruit that always go to waste. Then they make a seasoning by curing banana peels with koji (a mould), then dehydrating and mixing the peels, leading to an umami-rich powder. The koji–banana pores and skin seasoning is blended with water, then mixed with extra koji and salt, all of which ferments for 2 weeks to emphasise the soda’s savory character. Lastly, to stability the perceived saltiness of the soda, the RE workforce provides syrup produced from clarified banana juice, sugar and malt. Cooked in a water tub for 3 to 4 weeks, the syrup’s sugars caramelize whereas the banana blackens, echoing the remainder of the components. “It’s scrumptious since you’ve form of bought this banana, malty, salty soda that works very well with the pumpkin distillate,” says Whiley.
Whiley is not any stranger to working with high-concept strategies to govern surplus meals components into distinctive kinds and flavors. It’s an method that was on the coronary heart of his earlier award-winning bar, Scout, which equally pushed the boundaries of taste in cocktails. At RE, there’s nonetheless some R & D to be completed, however Whiley considers Scout the prequel to RE, understanding the kinks in pursuit of making the world’s lowest-waste bar.
“I’ve completed a number of analysis earlier than I start growing drinks and components,” says Whiley. “When you perceive how the flavors and components work collectively in principle, then it’s principally about testing the ratio of the drink, moderately than researching and growing an ingredient.”
Whiley believes that the entire cocktails he and his workforce make are works in progress, only one step in a strategy of steady enchancment—the Again to Black included. “Even for those who suppose the final model you made was one of the best, it’s all the time good to try to enhance it for the subsequent batch,” he says. “It’s an evolution.”
