Inside a Rescued Feast: The HK Dinner Saving Tonnes of Food
Most sustainability events have a problem: they feel like sustainability events.
The Rescued Feast was designed to fix that. It's a dining experience — first and last — built almost entirely from rescued ingredients, prepared by some of Hong Kong's most thoughtful chefs. The footprint is dramatically smaller than a typical dinner of equivalent quality. The atmosphere is closer to a friends' dinner party than a fundraising banquet.
This is what one of those nights actually looks like, and why a single dinner can prevent hundreds of kilograms of food from going to landfill.
How The Rescued Feast comes together
The week before the event, a small team works the phones across CHOMP's restaurant, bakery, supplier, hotel and farm partners. The brief is straightforward: what surplus do you have available, what's coming in this week that won't sell through, what cosmetic-grade-only produce is sitting at the wholesaler?
In the week leading up to the event, we have an evolving spreadsheet of incoming ingredients — usually 80–200 kg of food in total, spanning produce, bread, dairy, sometimes prepared components, often surprises. None of it was destined for sale through normal channels in the next 48 hours.
Then the chefs get given a rough sketch of what's coming, so they can begin designing the menu. But the magic really happens in the kitchen as the ingredients land. Hours before the event, the menu is set and prep is in full swing. Then, guests start arriving.
This is the part that's hard to convey from outside: the food is excellent because of the constraint, not despite it. Working with rescued ingredients forces a different kind of creativity than working from a fixed menu — chefs lean on technique, seasoning, and pairings rather than ingredient-driven flash. The food consistently surprises diners who come expecting "rescued = compromise."
What gets served
Most often (but not always!) the format is multi-course, family-style, served at long communal tables. A typical evening looks like:
3–4 small plates as people arrive — usually rescued bread, dips made from blemished produce, surplus charcuterie or cheese.
2-4 mains served family-style — some plant-forward, some using rescued protein.
Sides built around whatever produce came in heaviest that week.
Dessert — bread pudding from day-old sourdough, pavlova using egg-whites, chocolate cake using cacao powder.
The chefs
The Rescued Feast partners with talented chefs who are ready to take on the challenge of upscaling surplus, such as Chef Chris Czerwinski from Soho House, Chef Alex Lee from EATON HK, Chef May Chow from Little Bao and Chef Samaira Kavatkar (The Bombay East Indian Girl). Each chef brings their own voice; the constraint of working with rescued ingredients is what unifies the experience every time.
For many of the chefs, The Rescued Feast is the most creative kitchen they cook in all year. There's no service to run, no consistency requirement, no à la carte. Just a pile of ingredients and a room full of creative people who care about what's on the plate.
What a single dinner actually saves
The numbers from recent The Rescued Feast events:
Average food rescued per event: 80–200 kg
CO₂-equivalent emissions prevented per event: roughly 300–500 kg
Number of guests served per event: 40–200
Food rescue per guest: approximately 1.5–2 kg per person
To put that in context: a single The Rescued Feast event prevents roughly the same emissions as taking a small petrol car off the road for 6–10 weeks. A series of 10 events a year prevents over 4 tonnes of food from going to landfill and avoids around 8–10 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent emissions.
That's before you count the people who attend The Rescued Feast, walk away with a clearer mental model of what food rescue can taste like, and then shift their day-to-day habits afterwards.
What the room actually feels like
It's worth being clear about this, because "sustainability event" sets a particular expectation that The Rescued Feast doesn't match.
The room is loud. People share dishes across long tables or mingle near the buffet. There's wine, there's conversation, there's the kind of cross-table introduction that happens when you sit next to strangers and immediately have something to talk about. The sustainability story isn't pushed; it's a five-minute introduction from one of the chefs before the first course, then the food does the work.
If you've been to a wedding where everyone is half-listening to the speeches and waiting for dessert, The Rescued Feast is the opposite of that. The story is integrated into the experience because the experience couldn't exist without the story.
Why people come back
Most The Rescued Feast attendees come back. There are a few reasons:
The food is genuinely excellent, unique and creative. People come for the dinner, not the cause.
It's a one-time experience every time — no two dinners are alike because no two weeks of rescued surplus are alike.
It's a low-friction way to spend an evening on something they believe in — without filling out a form, joining a board, or writing a cheque.
The price point is reasonable — The Rescued Feast tickets are priced to be accessible (typically HK$400–600 per head) because the ingredient cost is dramatically lower than a conventional dinner of equivalent quality. It’s also a chance to try the food of a chef you love or are interested - without the five star dining price tag!
How to come to the next one
The Rescued Feast dinners sell out fast. Newsletter subscribers get a 48-hour window before public release, and that’s where we announce the event roughly 6 weeks before it’s scheduled for. If you want to come, the newsletter is the most reliable way in, but also keep an eye on CHOMP’s social media channels.
The bigger story
A single dinner doesn't fix Hong Kong's food waste problem. But The Rescued Feast was never about fixing it on its own. It exists to give people — diners, chefs, restaurants, suppliers — a concrete experience of what's actually possible when surplus is treated as a resource rather than a problem.
The point is to move the entire posture from "food waste is bad" to "food rescue is good," and to do it via the most direct route available: a great meal, eaten in good company, that wouldn't have existed without the surplus that made it possible.
If that sounds like an evening you'd want to be at, sign up to our Newsletter and follow us on Instagram to stay in the know. See you at the next one!
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Newsletter subscribers get a 48-hour window to book before public release. Past dinners have sold out within a day.
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