The other day, I wrote about plastic shopping bags being outlawed in San Francisco. Today, I read an online story from the San Francisco Chronicle about a voluntary initiative being undertaken by some Bay Area restaurants: eliminating bottled water from their menus.

This isn't water in a ubiquitous plastic bottle we're talking about–it's high-end water, primarily in glass bottles that restaurants buy for $1-2 and sell for $7-9 a bottle!

Why on earth would many of the Bay Area's finest and trendiest restaurants even consider such a move?

According to Mike Kossa-Rienzi, general manager of Chez Panisse:

Our whole goal of sustainability means using as little energy as we have to. Shipping bottles of water from Italy doesn't make sense.

Nopa's co-owner,  Jeff Hanak says:

Our goal is to be local. We can't do it with a lot of things, like Scotch, but we try to do it with the things we can.

For Nopa, local water means tap water. Chez Panisse considered locally bottled Calistoga, but ultimately chose tap water and a carbonator to replicate the fine fizziness of Santa Lucia.

In a typical year, Chez Panisse served 24,000 bottles of sparkling Santa Lucia. Do the math: at even $5 per bottle profit, Chez Panisse is walking away from $120,000 in revenue per year. Of course they wouldn't even consider doing so if their customers were adamantly opposed to the idea.

I think most people in the area where we live are going to be very open to it, Kossa-Rienzi says.

Hmmm…outlawing plastic shopping bags and removing bottled water from restaurant menus; methinks those trendy folks in the city by the Bay are onto something.

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