Fill it up
Merrill Shindler reports.
| More 'Front Burner' articles in this issue |
| Fair trade fish |
| Digesting timely topics |
| Please eat the pansies |
| Sweet chariot |
Los Angeles—In Southern California, chefs like to drive Mercedes. The cars are reliable, roomy, good looking—and they can be modified so that they're powered by French fries. And fried chicken. And fish 'n chips. It's a small trend at the moment. But it's a growing one. Amy Knoll Fraser, co-owner and wife of chef Neal Fraser (Grace, BLD) proudly shows me the couple's newly acquired 1999 silver gray Mercedes Turbo Diesel. "We bought it on eBay," she says. "We were inspired by Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth. And by the time we left the theater, we knew we had to do this."
"This" is converting their wheels to biofuel. Biofuel (read "vegetable oil") can be used to run cars powered by diesel. To make it work right, some tweaking is necessary—which in Los Angeles is done by an auto conversion shop in the Silver Lake District, just north of Downtown, with the marvelous name of Lovecraft Bio-Fuels (www.lovecraftbiofuels.com).
You can run your car on fresh vegetable oil ("A friend who doesn't have a restaurant buys 50-gallon drums of vegetable oil from Costco," says Knoll). Or you can filter the oil yourself. The process involves settling the oil, then running it through a filtering system several times (the systems are available from Lovecraft, which displays on its Web site a section explaining the hows and whats of filtering waste vegetable oil). There are also companies that sell filtered cooking oil—www.goveggiego.com and www.veggifuel.org.
But in the case of restaurant owners—well, the cooking oil needed to power their Mercedes can be found right next to their flattop. Chef Quinn Hatfield, whose eponymous restaurant is just a few doors down from BLD, had his 1984 Mercedes converted several months ago. And to run it, he bought the used oil from BLD and processed it in a shed behind his kitchen. "My cooking style doesn't use a lot of oil," he says. "They use canola oil, and canola seems to work best."
As a somewhat logical next step, chef Sang Yoon (Father's Office) is busy creating a mobile version of his high-profile beer-and-burger shop—which he intends to run using the filtered oil from his sweet potato fries. Which means the sweet aroma of recycled cooking oil may be heading for some of L.A.'s tonier addresses. Or perhaps not.
Hatfield insists that recycled vegetable oil hasn't a discernible aroma. Knoll says it may be psychosomatic—but she thinks she detects a hint of fried chicken. "People might think a KFC has moved into the neighborhood. But it's worth it if we're saving the environment."
