One of the World’s Most Influential Restaurants Has Closed
The pandemic restaurant casualties just keep coming. This time, unfortunately, it’s a true leader in sustainability.
Copenhangen’s Amass has closed its doors as of Tuesday, the chef-owner Matt Orlando announced on Instagram. In a post on the restaurant’s website, the closure is accompanied by a note stating that Amass was taken under bankruptcy proceedings.
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“Amass is not a physical space, but a mindset that transcends these walls,” Orlando wrote on Instagram. “It’s an ethos that is in the grasp of anyone who is willing to go through the motions to understand what it means for us as individuals to exist.”
That statement continues Orlando’s longtime project at Amass, which he ran with an eye—and a palate—toward sustainability in all its forms. He took that mission to heart, rather than simply using it as a vanity project to score points with both the culinary and environmental worlds. Case in point: He worked with outside analysts to assess Amass’s carbon footprint, and then made changes to the menu and the restaurant’s practices based on the numbers.
Most notably, Orlando ran a test kitchen devoted to finding new—and delicious—ways of reusing food waste. Many people have worked toward making food ways more sustainable, but often to the detriment of the actual taste of the end product. “If you’re a person operating in this sphere of upcycling and being responsible and you make something that is not delicious, you’re actually working against me,” Orlando told Robb Report last year. Instead,