THE FLATIRON NOMAD DISTRICT IS AMERICA'S GREENEST DINING DESTINATATION™
Located in the Flatiron & NoMad neighborhoods, NYC’s First Green Dining Destination™ is composed of a strong roster of highly reputable local restaurants who are championing green dining and improving the environmental footprint of their restaurants.
These restaurants have succeeded in attaining the Certified Green Restaurant® certification from the Green Restaurant Association, a national nonprofit organization whose sole mission has been helping the restaurant industry become more environmentally sustainable since 1990.
With the support of the Green Restaurant Association, Flatiron NoMad Partnership, and Madison Square Park Conservancy, this community of restaurants has banded together to form NYC’s First Green Dining Destination™, a beacon of sustainability attracting people from all over the world to The Place to Dine Green.
Having implemented 297 environmental steps to earn more than 1,500 GreenPoints™ (the GRA’s unit of measurement of a restaurant’s sustainability), NYC’s First Green Dining Destination™ is making quite the splash in improving the environmental impact of these restaurants. Collectively, these restaurants are saving 354,077 kWh of energy annually, the equivalent of removing 52.8 passenger vehicles off the road each year. Additionally, NYC’s First Green Dining Destination™ is saving 504,395 gallons of water every year, the equivalent of 46.3 backyard swimming pools worth of water. Perhaps the most impressive, these restaurants are diverting 969,465 pounds of waste from landfills per year through implementing recycling and composting programs, as well as additional waste reduction measures. That’s the same amount of weight as 5,356 average Americans combined.
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Why band together to form NYC’s First Green Dining Destination™? John Meadow of LDV Hospitality, which operates two Certified Green Restaurants in the area and several of NYC’s finest restaurants, is hoping to inspire other restaurants in the Flatiron & NoMad neighborhoods and beyond to improve the restaurant industry’s environmental impact. “I think the biggest challenge is the lack of awareness around the issue and commitment among restaurants to take action,” he said. “Many people believe that sustainability and environmental issues are too big for them, personally, to make an impact, so they do nothing. What we hope to educate the industry on is that taking small steps does help, and the more restaurants taking small steps is what we need to create big change.”