The pizzas at Shuggie’s Trash Pie taste a lot better than the restaurant’s name might imply. Just ask the legion of food critics who have praised the San Francisco pizzeria as one of the best in the country.

Owned by David Murphy and Kayla Abe, Shuggie’s Trash Pie is a “food waste paradise,” according to its website. Abe phrased it a little more delicately in a recent interview with NPR. “Shuggie’s is a climate solutions restaurant, utilizing all types of upcycled ingredients that are typically discarded by our conventional food system, and we make all of those the stars of our menu,” she recently told the Short Wave podcast.

According to Shuggie’s website, 40% of all food in the U.S. ends up in the trash, “often for absurd reasons like cosmetic irregularity or overabundance.” That’s a huge and pointless waste that represents “one of the largest environmental issues of our time,” the site adds.

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Shuggie’s makes its pizzas and other items—including “sexy share plates”—with foods that would typically go to waste, including irregular or surplus produce, byproducts from food manufacturing and offcuts from the meat industry. (The latter are often “the actual best cuts,” Shuggie’s website notes.)

Another word for that approach is “upcycled,” and it’s a trend that’s meant to benefit the environment. As Jonathan Foley, a climate scientist and executive director of the climate solutions think tank Project Drawdown, explained to Short Wave, “A surprising amount of the world’s greenhouse gases come from either producing food or the larger food system in which we all engage every day.”

For example, Shuggie’s pizza crust is made from the leftovers from oat milk factories, as Murphy explained to NPR. “It’s a spelt oat flour from the oat milk-making process. So companies like Oatly and Minor Figures…have this pulp that’s left over at the end of their process. It gets dehydrated, roasted, and then that gets milled down into a flour for us.”

Bruised veggies, wilting greens and beef hearts also get put to use at Shuggie’s for salads and meatballs, respectively. Past-their-prime carrot tops go into the restaurant’s chimichurri sauce, along with dried chilis, salt, vinegar and oil, all pulverized in an immersion blender.

Note, however, that Shuggie’s does not use expired foods as ingredients, but items that are nearing their expiration or best-buy date are fair game to prevent food waste. That strategy also keeps local and regional farms thriving.

“We owe everything to our farmers,” the restaurant’s website says. “We take great pride in carrying sustainable, regenerative and upcycled ingredients from our local foodshed.” Among Shuggie’s partner farmers: Lucero Organic, Heirloom Organic Gardens, Marin Roots Farm, Green Thumb Organics, Far West Fungi, Old Dog Ranch, Twin Girls Farm and the Rojas Family Farm.

Humble origins aside, Shuggie’s fare—along with its unique selection of natural wines—has inspired drooling reviews from food writers at major publications.

“The flavor of the dough is slightly lactic and tangy,” a writer for Vogue Magazine reported earlier this year.  “My dinner guest, once a denizen of Florence, compares it to a schiacciata bread she loved that was rumored to contain stracciatella—stretchy fresh cheese. Upcycled whey gives Shuggie’s pie acidity and stretch. Crisped cauliflower leaves do belong on pizza. Orange wine and trash pie is a pairing nonpareil.”

Bon Appetit named Shuggie’s Trash Pie one of the country’s best new restaurants in 2023, while the New York Times named it one of San Francisco’s top eateries that same year. 

“Everything in the front dining room at Shuggie’s—the floor, the stools, a cat-shaped wall clock—is banana yellow,” Elazar Sontag raved for Bon Appetit. “And everyone at those yellow stools and yellow tables seems to be having the best night of their lives. They dig into beef heart meatballs laced with an emulsion of past-their-prime greens and stab through Sexy Shroomy Hot Pockets stuffed with decidedly unsexy mushroom stems. From meatballs to pizza and on through dessert, the whole menu is built around a minimal-waste philosophy….From floor to ceiling, Shuggie’s is a psychedelic, see-it-to-believe-it temple to the sorts of wilted odds and ends we may have chucked in the compost. It’s unlikely fuel for one of the most delicious and exciting parties we’ve had the good fortune of attending.”