Eat well, drink well, listen to good music, read; spend time with good friends, engage in passionate conversations; stay close to nature, let nature give us a good workout, nourish us, calm us down.
Make our choices to create more desirable options in the future; support local production, avoid wasteful consumption; protect social and biological diversity around us because no one should have to live in a monoculture
Create value, don’t worry about maximizing profits–just be sustainable in our finances as in everything else; let our suppliers and our customers–even our fellow citizens who may not be aware of our existence–be a little better off while we get better off
Be curious, do research, experiment, share our learnings; support people who want to contribute; try to help little dreams come true so that we all can dream bigger dreams
These are two questions we feel we need to ask ourselves on a daily basis until we can give honest, straight-forward answers. Answers that make sense in relation to our own wellbeing as well as the wellbeing of future generations…
We operate with these ambitions. We realize that these goals are often in conflict; it’s harder to find local produce in a big city that’s organic, for instance. So, we’re routinely forced to make compromises; and that’s what we try to highlight in our daily business. When we understand the trade-offs we’re facing, and make conscious choices, we believe that we can significantly reduce the harm we’d otherwise inflict on our bodies and the environment.
Why do we insist on local? Because we’d like to minimize our carbon footprint. Because we’d like to avoid the use of unknown (or quite well known!) chemicals to preserve our food on a long journey. And because we believe that helping our producers afford to live close by enriches the social fabric of our big city.
We sometimes put organic in quotation marks; that’s because the word has been overused and hollowed out of its intended meaning to some degree. We respect and value the certification process, but at the same time, we’re concerned that it may favor industrial-scale enterprises. That’s why we also choose to work with small producers that adhere to the principles of organic production even if they can’t afford the certification. But we’re always careful in indicating that distinction in our labeling. Whether or not the word organic appears in front of each ingredient that’s in our end-products, is not a marketing ploy; it’s our attempt at being as transparent on this issue as possible. With or without the organic certification, our goal is always to serve fruits and vegetables that are free from GMOs, chemical fertilisers, chemical pesticides, and chemical preservatives. And of course, we’ve the same princeiples regarding the chickens, eggs, and dairy products that we serve.
Last but not least, we aim for sustainable production and consumption. We realize that we’re very fortunate to have a lot of resources. If we’re smart, those resources should allow countless generations to lead increasingly richer lives on this planet. Of course, we also have the option of wasting our resources, and ruining our chances for a pleasant future. Every day we make hundreds of choices that’ll ultimately determine which path we’re on. Our goal is to show that it’s not so hard to make the right choices.
We like to do things in-house. Sure, we grow our own food–that’s a big deal. We make our own bread, cheese, yoghurt, salad dressings, and sauces–maybe that’s somewhat expected. We also design and cut our own furniture, which is a bit strange, but we enjoy it. We thought, why not–let’s also create our own online ordering platform. We didn’t do this from scratch though; we used a cloud based POS system called Revel, and adapted it to our needs, translated it into Turkish, etc. Why go through so much trouble? Because we get much more flexibility in designing our menu that offers literally millions of unique choices to our customers. We can make much quicker changes when we want to add/delete menu items based on availability of ingredients. We get to own our own data. And last but not least, we don’t have to pay crazy commissions to a third party that uses its monopolistic market power to extract all the profits from small ventures like us. With the money we save, we can offer highest quality food at (hopefully) affordable prices. People ask us (sometimes incredulously) how we can use organic ingredients and manage to sell the food at our prices. That’s how… So go ahead, order online using our own portal:
It’s a work in progress, and with your input, we can make it better. So please don’t be shy to give us feedback.
Is there a soup that you like to drink and like in the last weeks and want to see in the menu again? In summer, let’s do it again next week if the materials are still in season. Is there something in our salad bar that you wish? Why not, if we can find your local, your organics, and we can offer you an affordable price …
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