Changing the recipe
June 9, 2026 - At Six Senses Ninh Van Bay and Six Senses London, Chef Walter Butti and Chef Eliano Crespi are rethinking food waste through peels, pulp, ferments, and flavor as Six Senses joins the UN-backed Recipe of Change initiative.
Executive Chef Walter Butti is figuring out what to do with bananas. When we caught up at Six Senses Ninh Van Bay, he was four batches into what may become his latest signature: banana peels, marinated in vanilla, then slowly dried into glossy black chips. “Tasty, rich in antioxidants, and another step closer to zero waste.”
Where every ingredient counts
That, in one bite, is Eat With Six Senses: simple, natural food, thoughtfully sourced, beautifully prepared, and designed to make every ingredient count. It is the same thinking that led Six Senses to sign the Recipe of Change earlier this year, the UNEP and UN Tourism initiative to halve global food waste by 2030. The truth is, our chefs have been working this way since our beginnings. A homegrown pineapple might start the day as breakfast juice and reappear later as a table decoration. Coffee grounds become spa scrubs, or, when mixed with cocopeat, even dining tables.
The Scrap Challenge
Chef Walter has been refining this approach for years. He joined Six Senses Yao Noi in 2017 and immediately set about taking plastic and air miles out of the kitchen, finding 30 local Thai alternatives to his favorite imported cheeses along the way. When he moved to Six Senses Zighy Bay, vacuum bags and squeeze bottles disappeared on day one, and his chefs learned intricate plating techniques using nothing more than a spoon. Some of his best experiments came through the Scrap Challenge. “Fish scraps became cat food. Our felines eat like royalty.”
Growing with purpose
Back at Six Senses Ninh Van Bay, Chef Walter now has the pick of the produce at Solar FreshCuts, the resort’s organic garden growing beneath eight hundred solar panels, an arrangement that recently earned the UNEP-supported Global Low-Carbon Scenic Spot prize.
“We plan production with our gardening teams around seasonality and occupancy, so we can adjust in real time,” he says. “Beyond reducing waste, the real impact comes when you identify a dish where nothing even reaches the compost. Take nut milk. Most kitchens make the milk, then figure out what to do with the pulp. We start with what the pastry team needs. The nuts go into cakes and pastries, and the milk becomes the byproduct. That’s the win.”
Fermentation and flavor
Beneath Six Senses London and Whiteley’s Kitchen sits the first dedicated fermentation lab in a UK hotel. Stainless steel shelves are stacked with kefirs, kombuchas, vinegars, shio koji, and wild ferments, every batch logged and tested. Precision, patience, and a healthy respect for microbes. At the center of it all is Executive Chef Eliano Crespi, with 25 years of experience in some of the world’s leading kitchens and the kind of curiosity that keeps chefs pioneering. “If we were going to do fermentation,” he says, “we had to mean it.”
For Eliano, fermentation is one of the oldest tools in the low-waste kitchen. Sourdough becomes a house-made Marmite. Citrus peel becomes chong, a Korean fermented syrup. Croissants are reborn as praline, folded into seasonal chocolate bars waiting in your room. Organic British fava beans become hummus, finished with house-made harissa oil and Moroccan-style preserved lemons cured in-house. Even the humble leek gets its full moment, roasted over birchwood, its greens worked into a walnut vinaigrette, served over fermented wild garlic.
“That’s life at Six Senses London for me,” he says. “Modern cuisine using British ingredients, with one eye on what’s growing now and the other on ancestral techniques that have fed people for thousands of years. Primordial fermentation and preservation. Let nature lead and use everything.”
At Six Senses, scraps become signatures and ferments become flavor. Spend enough time with chefs like Walter Butti and Eliano Crespi, and you start seeing possibilities everywhere. We now bring that same spirit to the advisory board of the UN-backed Recipe of Change initiative, where Director of Sustainability Jennifer Klar and Director of Eat With Six Senses Farah Condor will work alongside selected hospitality leaders to help reduce food waste by 50 percent by 2030.