Next time you go out to eat, peep the bill.
It’s globally known that California offers some of the best restaurant options in the nation. But heads up: if you live here and are fan of eating out, you may start to see an optional 1% surcharge added to your bill.
Restaurants residing in California can choose to tack on a 1% fee to their guest’s check once enrolled in the Restore California Renewable Restaurant program. The money then goes to a public fund that helps support farmers who use practices which reduce carbon in the atmosphere. The surcharge is optional for customers but Anthony Myint, an organizer of the initiative, told CNN that if all diners at a certain eatery pay it, the haul would be more than enough to make the establishment carbon neutral.
Myint is a restauranteur who started Zero Foodprint, a non-profit that helps support the program. Myint and his wife built Zero Foodprint back in 2013 after thinking of ways they could help to preserve the world that they wanted their newborn daughter to live in; ultimately this meant fighting climate change. The non-profit helps restaurants assess, reduce, and offset their carbon footprints.
As for their new initiative, the Restore California Renewable Restaurant program, they hope that restaurants across the state will proudly join and display Restore California logos on their windows and/or websites. The goal is to drive Californians to restaurants that have made a choice to help the environment by supporting farms that are producing food in ways that don’t add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Wolfgang Puck’s Spago restaurant is one of the several Los Angeles restaurants that has already jumped on board.