Since the day Michelle Carpenter began conceptualizing and designing her Cajun restaurant in Oak Cliff, she had an ambitious goal in her sightline: run a restaurant in the most ethically and environmentally conscious way possible.
How could that be measured? By achieving the notoriously hard-to-secure B Corp Certification, she thought. Only 72 restaurants around the world have met the certification’s high social and environmental standards. She hoped her restaurant could join their ranks.
Two years after it opened, Restaurant Beatrice is now the first Texas-based restaurant to receive B Corp Certification, and one of less than a dozen restaurants in the country to do so. The designation, which must be applied for through non-profit organization B Lab and involves a rigorous auditing process, is used as a measuring stick for a business’ environmental performance, accountability and transparency.
Getting the certification required implementing environmentally conscious practices throughout the restaurant, tracking and filing a trove of data, paying thousands of dollars in certification fees, racking up countless hours of labor and copious amounts of patience, Carpenter told The Dallas Morning News.
“It was very challenging, but we knew we were doing the right things and making these positive, small changes,” she said. “Once we did receive [the certification], it was a certain kind of validation that all of our hard work paid off.”
Part of Carpenter’s motivation for pursing B Corp standards came from the rampant waste she saw in the restaurant industry. To reduce her own restaurant’s waste, she and her team utilize every square inch of an ingredient possible, and compost every food scrap the restaurant produces. That compost is used as fertilizer by a local farmer who Carpenter sources produce from.
Restaurant Beatrice, which is currently the only restaurant in Dallas to hold the city’s platinum level recognition for certified green businesses, also sources locally for every ingredient possible. Carpenter has built a network of local growers and producers that she works with to shape her menus around seasonality.
Her interest in sustainability goes back to a time in her life when that word wasn’t even on her radar. As a young child living in Louisiana’s Winn Parish, she watched her grandmother — who made it through the Great Depression as a single mother of three children — live off the land. She pickled, canned, jellied, and preserved the fruitage she grew with her own hands. Nothing went to waste.
“I think we had to reuse foil three times before she would let us throw it away,” Carpenter said laughing but not joking.
Restaurant Beatrice, named after Carpenter’s grandmother, is an homage to her resourcefulness and the respect with which she treated nature’s bounty. It was a non-negotiable that the restaurant be run the way Beatrice herself would likely do it.
“I really wanted to honor my grandmother and everything she has done,” Carpenter said.
Hanh Ho, a partner in Restaurant Beatrice, said the path to B Corp Certification was arduous but made easier by a handful of organizations that lent a hand during the process like the James Beard Foundation, the Louisiana Travel Association and Dallas College.
There were times when they thought they wouldn’t achieve the certification, Ho said, but they pushed through out of a sense of obligation to the restaurant industry as a whole.
“We’ve moved a couple of boulders, we hope, so that other people can do this, too,” Ho said. “When you get into the restaurant industry, you inherit the culinary world and its problems. This work is about a responsibility we have toward the future. It’s about a problem we’re choosing to not ignore.”
Both Carpenter and Ho hope to see more restaurants pursue environmentally conscious operations, and they hope to be a resource for those who embark on the journey.
“Sometimes you think greatness is something giant and it’s immediately profound, but sometimes greatness is separating your trash and choosing to compost,” said Ho. “Sometimes it’s a bunch of small menial tasks that no one wants to do.”
