What if you routinely came to a city you loved—say, New York—but couldn’t find healthy, tasty organic food you really liked at an affordable price? Most people would simply shrug in disappointment and say, “Oh, well.” Or, you could do as entrepreneur Alberto González did and just build your own restaurant.
“I’m from Buenos Aires, Argentina,” González told Organic Connections. “I used to come to New York often and had a very tough time finding good-quality food at a price I was able to afford. And when I say good-quality food, I mean quality from a nutritional standpoint, from a healthy standpoint, and tasty stuff. That rang a bell for me, and I started to think it was an opportunity to survive by doing the right things. Then I began researching America’s food system, and what I learned was enough motivation to create my business plan and eventually move to New York and start up this business.”
The business is GustOrganics, the only fully USDA-certified organic restaurant in New York City. All the tasty dishes on the Latin fusion menu are organic—and it is certainly a flavorful menu. There are mouth-watering soups; thin-crust pizzas; González’s personal favorite, empanadas; and much more.
In addition to bringing health to his customers, González knows that organics also bring flavor. “The problem I see is that in America we have taught ourselves to eat with a lot of spices, even without noticing,” González observed. “My opinion, based on what I’ve learned, is that ingredients in a grocery store that are not organic or locally grown really have very little taste. After many years of using these kinds of ingredients, we just find ways to incorporate a lot of spices in order to get flavor out of things. Not so long ago, Argentina was a country where we ate very fresh and didn’t use many spices because food had plenty of taste itself. So we try to do that at GustOrganics and not use a lot of spices.”
Since fully organic ingredients aren’t readily available from traditional restaurant food distributors, González had to choose his sources carefully. “We decide on who we work with based on like-minded people and shared values, which is the key to long-term success,” said González. “We work with different farmers through a co-op and get a lot of stuff from them. We also have agreements with some distributors. We try to do the business as locally as we can, even though on the East Coast it’s hard because of the seasons and the weather. It’s very difficult to have consistency on some of the ingredients and to do only seasonal stuff, but we do as much as we can.”
González bases part of his menu on what is seasonally and locally available, and also on tried-and-true recipes. “We have specials that we change every day,” he said. “We base those specials on whatever we can source in season. We also have the regular menu, which is a little bit steadier even though we make changes.”
If you happen to order a cocktail, you’ll find GustOrganics’ bar is also fully USDA-certified organic. In addition to a full line of organic spirits, any fruit juices—organic, of course—in the drinks are freshly squeezed on the spot.
The sustainable factor doesn’t end with the food. “I would say with confidence that we are perhaps the greenest restaurant in the world,” González remarked. “Every resource, everything about the restaurant, is done in a sustainable way. We do recycling and composting. We run on 100 percent wind power. We use a lot of sunlight during the day through skylights that provide about 70 percent of our lighting. We do catering and take-out too, and all the packaging we use is environmentally friendly and most of it is biodegradable. We use no plastics. We print only on 100 percent post-consumer paper with soy ink. All the cleaning procedures and pest control is completely green. The whole place was built using environmentally friendly materials; we used no chemical paint, and all the floors and tables are made from wood we recovered from barns, which is perhaps 150, 200 years old. We use a lot of LED lighting inside and outside. The list goes on and on.”
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Despite a depressed economy, GustOrganics has received very positive feedback from consumers and has done well. “When I started to build the place in 2007, the economy was booming,” González recalled. “When we opened it though, in 2008, the US was in a big recession. In light of the fact I had never owned a restaurant before, and New York City is the most competitive market for restaurants and we opened during a recession, we have done very well. We became profitable after ten months in operation, which is unheard of, and we’re still open after two and a half years and growing every month. We made a lot of mistakes because we didn’t know how to do many things, but we’ve been improving as fast as we could.”
González sees what he is doing as a shift in business motivation, badly needed in today’s world. “One of the big things that I discovered is that most companies do business trying to maximize profits. The main driver to start up any business is making money. But when it’s about food, in my opinion, the driver needs to be something that is good for people, because as Feuerbach, a German philosopher, once said, we are what we eat. This is not like buying a toy or a car, which at the end of the day is not part of ourselves. So, at GustOrganics, we are in the business of doing good things for people first. That’s our main target. Second, we want to do those things without harming the environment, because you can do something very nice for people but you can also be wasting the environment, which does not make any sense. Sustainable development is about showing respect to humans and our planet, and also respect toward ourselves.”
González hopes that what he is doing won’t just start a trend in the US but will ultimately make its way back to his own country. “In Argentina the food used to be very fresh,” González explained. “The soils are very fertile and everything grows. People were not much into organics because when they went to the grocery store they would find terrific quality ingredients, including meat and vegetables. But the thing is that America is an amazing country, and whether we like it or not, whatever we do here is being copied everywhere. Unfortunately the cultural practices of the US have been emulated in my country too. As a result, Argentina has now been transformed into a very monocultural kind of place with a lot of factory farming as well. So, my coming to America was not only to try to change things here but also eventually to help change my own country.”
To learn more about GustOrganics, visit their website at www.gustorganics.com.
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