Small restaurant, small footprint — on purpose
We're a burger joint, not a nonprofit. But running a restaurant for 27 years teaches you something about waste. You see how much food gets thrown away, how much energy the fryers eat, how many disposable containers go in the trash. At some point you either keep ignoring it or you start fixing it. Abraham started fixing it about fifteen years ago, and we've been at it since.
People ask us about the environmental impact of beef. Fair question. Here's our honest answer: beef has a big footprint. We can't change that. What we can do is source from ranches that practice rotational grazing, which actually improves soil health and sequesters carbon. Our suppliers don't run feedlots. Their cattle eat grass on open pasture. It's more expensive, it takes longer, and the yield is lower — but the environmental math works out better than factory farming by every measure we've seen.
All food scraps — vegetable trimmings, bun ends, eggshells, coffee grounds — go to a commercial composting facility. We separate waste at both locations. It's not glamorous work, but we divert roughly 40% of our waste from landfills this way.
Our fryer oil gets picked up by a biodiesel company. Instead of going down a drain, it becomes fuel. We generate about 50 gallons per week across both locations, all of which gets converted instead of wasted.
We switched to paper-based containers and compostable cups years ago. Paper straws since 2019. Are they perfect? No — paper straws get soggy. But they don't spend 400 years decomposing in the ocean, which feels like the right trade-off.
Our buns come from a Bay Area bakery. Ice cream from Mitchell's in the Outer Mission. Produce from local distributors. None of our core ingredients travel more than 100 miles. That's not a marketing claim — it's just how short supply chains work when you buy from your neighbors.
Both locations run LED lighting and Energy Star equipment. Our San Bruno exhaust hood has a variable-speed motor that adjusts based on cooking load instead of running full blast all day. It sounds small, but it cuts kitchen energy use by about 15%.
We're not perfect and we don't pretend to be. Our takeout bags are still paper with a plastic lining. We haven't figured out a way to do delivery without disposable containers. The honest truth is that some parts of the restaurant industry are hard to make sustainable, and we'd rather tell you what we actually do than make promises we can't keep.
If you have ideas, we're listening. Talk to Abraham — he's usually at the San Bruno spot and he genuinely wants to hear it.