The bottled water served at Rioja is selected to complement the Mediterranean-style cuisine. It comes from Italy, of course. Fiji water, though just as exotic and expensive, would be all wrong, I guess.
At The Kitchen in Boulder, a high-end restaurant dedicated to sustainable agriculture and supporting local organic growers, Eldorado Natural Spring Water – served in reusable bottles – is the H2O of choice.
WaterCourse Foods, a vegetarian restaurant in Denver, serves mostly tap, although managing chef Chadwick Breithaupt said bottled Eldorado water is available with takeout orders. Recycling is encouraged.
The “drink local” movement in Colorado may be little more than a trickle at this point, but prepare for a tsunami.
Long a fashion statement, water is turning political.
Now that $8 bottle of San Pellegrino on your table no longer just says, “Don’t you wish you could afford to blow eight bucks on something as ridiculous as imported water?” It says, “When it comes to global warming, I’m part of the problem.”
The Natural Resources Defense Council has calculated that the carbon dioxide released in the transport of bottled water from France, Italy and New Zealand – the three largest exporters of water to the U.S. – is the equivalent of adding 700 cars to the roads.
That’s actually the minor problem.
The big issue is the empties.
The American Waterworks Association has estimated that 20 billion units of bottled water are sold annually in the U.S., and only 10 percent of them are recycled.
The rest, about 18 billion bottles, pile up in landfills.
And for what? It’s not like there’s a shortage of drinking water in this country.
Drinking locally is already big in California and New York.
Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., has joined other restaurateurs in making the case that shipping water thousands of miles in bottles that are used once and thrown away is an extravagance the rapidly warming planet no longer can afford.
Waters quit buying the stuff last year and now serves only filtered tap water in her restaurant. She even bought a carbonation machine to satisfy customers hooked on fizz.
Patricia Perry, owner of Highlands Garden Cafe in Denver and a fan of Waters, announced this week that she is switching to Colorado Crystal water after offering San Pellegrino from Italy and Lissa from France in the restaurant.
“I’ve read about this and decided it’s something we should do,” she said. “I think everybody should do their part.”
If water connoisseurs can see past the marketing hype, they’ll discover that tap water in Denver is delicious, said Brian Good, director of operations and maintenance at Denver Water. Men’s Journal recently rated it the best in the country, Good said.
The secret is the source.
“When it comes to water, you can’t get much better than Rocky Mountain snowmelt,” he said, and Denver gets first dibs on the runoff. Downstream folks are not so lucky.
“I saw a study once that found water from the South Platte is used seven or eight times before it leaves the state,” he said. That means it’s used, flushed into sewer systems, treated and discharged into the river again and again.
Even then, the tap water may be cleaner than some bottled products.
The NRDC found a third of the 103 brands analyzed in four years of testing contained biological or chemical contaminants, some above the limits allowed by states. And while some water legitimately comes from natural aquifers or springs, the NRDC found that about 25 percent of the bottled water sold in the U.S. comes from municipal water supplies.
It’s tap water with an attitude.
Good buys it only when he has no alternative.
“I feel very strongly about it,” he said. “If I’m at a meeting and there are bottles of water on the table, I’ll leave the room to fill my glass with tap water to emphasize the point. It’s a bit of a sore spot with me.”
And, he said, “you can’t beat the price of Denver water.” Bottled water sells for anywhere from around $1 to $8 or more per liter. From the tap, Denver water costs $1.72 for 1,000 gallons.
Bottoms up.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Reach her at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
