What's Left Over

Once a month, in the kitchen, something simple happens: what's left over doesn't end up in the bin. It becomes a lesson, becomes food for those who need it, becomes a choice made again and again - the same one, every time - about what real hospitality means.
There's a moment, at the end of every service, when a kitchen shows who it really is. On the counter sit trimmings, surplus, ingredients that never made it onto a plate but are still worth exactly what they were an hour ago. That's the moment that tells you whether hospitality is just appearance, or whether it has a backbone.
At La Perla, once a month, that moment opens up and is shared. The chefs of Casa Costa 1956, the Casa Costa Foundation ETS team, staff and anyone who wants to put on an apron gather around the same surplus - collected from kitchens across the valley, ingredients no one else would have looked at twice. And they work with them together: techniques, recipes, the craft explained hand by hand as it happens.
It isn't a demonstration. It's real cooking, made to be given away: everything produced that day goes to local organisations working every day with people in need. Rescue, cook, learn, give. A cycle that closes without leaving anything out.
Behind it is an idea Casa Costa 1956 has carried for a long time: hospitality that works doesn't extract from a place, it gives back. It doesn't consume, it regenerates. Food isn't only the experience we offer our guests - it's a responsibility that continues after the last plate has left the kitchen. Food waste, for a professional kitchen, isn't a technical detail to optimise. It's a contradiction a kitchen like ours can't afford to ignore.
It's Casa Costa Foundation ETS that makes it possible for this to happen consistently - a fixed appointment, not a one-off initiative - and that gets the food where it's actually needed. But the gesture starts in the kitchen, with the people who handle and transform the food every day. It isn't volunteering added on top of the job. It's the job, carried all the way through.
A monthly appointment, open to everyone who works in a kitchen every day and to anyone who wants to discover what it really means not to waste anything.
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