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A shrimp head usually doesn’t get top billing. At Bangkok Supper Club next week, it gets its own moment on the plate.
The West Village restaurant is one of the spots joining the third annual Make Food Not Waste Restaurant Week, running Monday, September 28, through Sunday, October 4. Organized by food recycling company Mill, the event asks participating kitchens to find more uses for their ingredients and keep food scraps out of the trash. Diners can try the results as a special dish, a three-course menu, a cocktail or a food-and-drink pairing.
At Bangkok Supper Club, chef Max Wittawat’s $24 botan ebi toast makes a strong case for using the whole shrimp. The shells become coconut chili cream, the sweet raw shrimp goes on toast brushed with smoked brown butter and the head arrives deep-fried on the side as a crispy bonus.
Corima is going further with a three-course menu. There, Chef Fidel Caballero will turn wild greens into a stew served over a sope, grill hamachi collar over fire and give a bluefin tostada a mango-seed version of sikil pak, a Mayan dip traditionally made with pumpkin seeds.
Elsewhere, Somssi is turning the remains of its Potato Potato Potato dish into gamja sujebi, a Korean hand-torn noodle soup finished with crispy chicken skin and potato crunch. At Bar Chucho, a burger gets extra depth from a garum made by fermenting beef scraps and bones for six months.
The drinks get in on it, too. Chambers is pairing carrots with yogurt and carrot-top pesto with a strawberry-and-malted-milk cocktail called the Cornish Split. Oberon, inside the New Museum, is making a nonalcoholic rose and pomegranate drink with an oleo saccharum made from salvaged citrus scraps.
The restaurants’ commitment extends beyond the specials. Mill says it works with Reclaimed Organics to collect scraps during the week; the processed material will go to a downtown Manhattan community garden for composting. That won’t tell you which dish to order, but it does give the leftovers somewhere useful to go.