Chef-owner Manoella Buffara elevates regional ingredients into elegant fine dining in her Curitiba restaurant in the Brazilian state of Paraná, home to the Iguazu Falls, and is widely considered one of the best chefs in Latin America. But even more commendable than her cooking is her commitment to reconnecting the people of Curitiba with food, and improving the food system of her home. She started with bees - placing hives around the city, which quickly became talking points, and works to create urban farms and educate others to grow and cook through her Instituto Manu Buffara. She has over eighty gardeners growing for her across the city, and scores of children visit her own vegetable garden each week. The five-table, tasting menu-only restaurant is 60% plant-based. Manu uses local meat and fish but has eschewed beef, the cause of so much destruction in the Amazon, since 2019. She has just opened Ella in New York and launched a one year pop-up in the Maldives, translating her precise and authentic approach to local and seasonal cuisine for the Soneva Fushi resort.

We hear plenty of good things about Arnaud Lallement's cooking, but few customers know that this unshowy chef is in the process of transforming his restaurant to meet high environmental standards - perhaps because he’s not the type to shout about saving the world with a handful of fine dining covers. Just outside of Reims, L’Assiette’s gardener Benoit Deloffre has spent several years working on his vegetable garden, which now produces edible flowers, vegetables, and herbs. Lallement has his own beehives and cooks with produce that is either certified organic or produced along organic lines. The kitchen has gone fully electric and waste is composted. All in all it feels like a sustainable step-by-step evolution of a fine dining restaurant compared to the approaches of more radical chefs.