Restaurant Accountability

In the November 24, 2008 issue of The New Yorker is an article Garden of Contentment by Fuchsia Dunlop concerning The Manor, a restaurant in Hangzhou, China. The restaurant is remarkable for its attention to the ingredients it uses and, to this end:

Guests can look through a “purchase diary,” a large leather-bound volume containing copies of each day’s contracts with the farmers and artisans who supply the kitchens, along with photographs of them picking vegetables, making rice wine, and slaughtering pigs.

I’m convinced that transparency and accountability are going to increase in value in the near future, to the point where we’ll consider it foolhardy to eat out at restaurant that doesn’t provide an audit trail for all of its offerings.