From the creators of the Visa Street Food Festival comes a new concept: waterless dinners. The Studio H food design team will be hosting a series of three pop-up waterless dinners from 23 to 25 January in Cape Town. In addition to drawing awareness to Cape Town’s current drought, they will also be donating all profits to Veld and Sea, a fynbos rehabilitation company that recently burnt down.

The innovative ketchups made with vegetables grown with seawater. Photo by Hendrik Coetzee.

The venture is inspired by Studio H’s water-wise initiative called S/Zout, which draws attention to the edible properties and possibilities of sea water and sea salt. At the moment the team is creating a ‘future food pantry’ consisting of vegetables that should be grown for a sustainable future. As 69% of water is used for agriculture, finding crops that are salt tolerant means that that huge percentage of irrigation water can be replaced by seawater.

Carrots grown using saltwater. Photo by Hendrik Coetzee.

As such, all three dinners will be made using salt-tolerant crops. The menu is set to include items such as ostrich egg, sea-water beer and camel-milk ice cream.

There will be only 87 tickets available in total for the dinners, which is the amount of water (in litres) each person in Cape Town is allowed to use per day.

Tickets will be available via Quicket and cost R550 each. The dinners will take place at 37 Parliament Street, Cape Town.