It looks like it’s just a piece of toast–albeit a very fancy piece of toast, artfully laden with greens and flower petals and part of a $12 appetizer. But the bread is actually an example of the future of sustainability in food: The grains used to make the flour were bred to help suck carbon out of the atmosphere.

Welcome to The Perennial, a new restaurant in San Francisco that aims to be, as the founders put it, “the most environmental ever.”

Two years after coming up with the idea to create a restaurant that could serve as a lab to test new approaches to sustainability in the food world, restaurateurs Anthony Myint and Karen Leibowitz have built something that incorporates every possible green feature.

Kitchen scraps, for example, are sent to an aquaponic greenhouse across the bay in Oakland, where worms compost the food waste. The worms are then turned into fish food, and the fish help fertilize a crop of greens that are sent back to the restaurant.

“I think the biggest thing that we want to share is our relationship to food waste,” says Leibowitz. “We’re trying to address it in a commercial context, where a fine dining restaurant is so wasteful…portions can be so wasteful. That’s one of the things we’re innovating on and want to share with others.”

Even the paper menus are printed with ink that can be safely eaten by worms, so when the menus wear out, they’re also sent to the compost bin. When I went to visit the restaurant the night before it opened, the straw in my drink was made from actual straw.

The bright, open kitchen is filled with extra-efficient appliances (and even pots that heat up more quickly to save energy). The cocktails are mixed in advance to save water. The ceiling is lined with wood scraps from the construction of the posts in the dining room, which were recovered from the nearby Transbay Terminal. Every element in the restaurant, from the chairs to the refrigerator in the bar, was carefully chosen for its sustainability.