Fancy a six-course meal costing $54 and made from food waste?

SINGAPORE – From Aug 28 to 30, Temasek Shophouse is serving a six-course menu for $54, whipped up by the former head chef of a Michelin-starred restaurant. 

Sounds good? There is just one catch: Every dish is made from food waste. Here, common kitchen scraps like prawn shells and coffee grounds get a new lease of life, turned into gourmet dishes that taste far better than they sound. 

Organised as part of Green-House, a sustainability festival, Eat Your Scraps kicks off with two starters: a kohlrabi and root vegetable salad with spent coffee shoyu made from upcycled coffee grounds; and a umami-laden split pea hummus topped with heirloom tomatoes and a vegetable peel treacle. 

For the mains, prawn shells are crushed into an XO sauce and served with cavatellini, pickled ginger flowers and tobiko. Pickled citrus piths, meanwhile, are repurposed in a salad, injecting a zesty fragrance that balances out the earthy notes of beetroot studding the mixed-grain tabbouleh. 

The meal ends with two desserts. One uses the whole banana, even the peel, which is turned into jam and paired with malted milk panna cotta. The other caramelises stale bread into a sweet sauce, drizzling it over poached guava. 

Participants also receive a complimentary 180ml packet of Nobo Soy or Almond Soy Milk, a guided tour with the creators of Eat Your Scraps, as well as a set of recipe cards breaking down the components of their meal.  

The idea is to equip them with the know-how to repurpose food scraps in their daily life.

“The people getting these recipes would be home cooks, so we wanted to design recipes that are approachable and easily replicable,” says chef Russell Nathan, 39, co-founder of Bricolage, a cafe at The Arts House.

For Eat Your Scraps, he collaborated with creative director Michelle Au of food design company Nottofu and Michelle Chow, co-founder of Green-House.

Beyond their novelty, Nathan, the former head chef of one-Michelin-starred Nouri in Amoy Street, stresses the importance of ensuring that the dishes taste good. “If it’s not tasty, and it’s not something that you would eat daily, then what’s the point of making it?” 

Chow, likewise, lives by a quote from Canadian cookbook author and zero-waste advocate Anne-Marie Bonneau: “We don’t need a handful of people doing zero waste perfectly. We need millions of people doing it imperfectly.” 

“To make sustainability a mainstream lifestyle, it’s important to bring people together to see that sustainability can be a very desirable and doable thing at home,” says the 38-year-old. 

The theme of the 2026 festival is Don’t Waste A Good Time, and in trying to come up with programmes that would appeal to a broad swathe of Singaporean society, Au and Chow decided to tap the national love language. 

Food, after all, is the first thing many Singaporeans are taught not to waste.

“Yet, growing up, our parents would also teach us to throw away these scraps. It’s almost like you learn that they have no value, but you just don’t question it,” says Au, 49.

“So we hope that through this, people will start to see that they can eat differently.” 

Those who would rather experience the menu without the tour can also book their slot on nottofu.cococart.co/shop. It costs $78++ and comes with larger portions which feed up to three people. 

Three-course vegan and pescatarian menus are available too, priced at $42 each. The first 50 buyers enjoy an early-bird discount.

Walk-ins can be accommodated while stocks last, though pre-orders help the team manage their resources more efficiently. “As much as we want to make it accessible to guests, we don’t want to waste food,” says Au. 

Chow adds: “Waste is challenging to work with because it’s unpredictable. It’s actually more difficult to source for waste than it is to obtain whole ingredients. Timing is also really important, because you don’t want to capture the waste when it’s started to rot.” 

Most of the waste featured in Eat Your Scraps is generated in-house at Bricolage. Initially, Au wanted to add fish and chicken bones to the menu too. 

“But the Bricolage team pointed out that bones can be recycled only up to a certain point. You can’t eat them. And because we wanted to try our best to achieve zero food waste, we chose to work with ingredients that could be fully circular,” she says.

Where: Temasek Shophouse, 28 Orchard Road
When: Aug 28 to 30; menu available from 6pm to 10pm on Friday and 4pm to 10pm on Saturday and Sunday; guided tour experience available from 5pm to 6pm and 8pm to 9pm daily
Info: str.sg/GNc6