Restaurant Week Preview: Taranta

Restaurant Week Pick: Taranta
[210 Hanover Street; 617-720-0052; Dinner only.]

As you’re chowing down on cut-rate cuisine, don’t forget that restaurants use five times the energy of other retail businesses. In recent years, Taranta’s mountain man-like chef, Jose Duarte, has been quietly blazing a trail for other local restaurants to follow in the world of sustainable restaurant practices, and blogging it all as he goes. “Green”-obsessed Restaurant Week goers will be relieved to hear that Duarte currently offsets about 80 metric tons of the carbon produced every year in making his signature Peruvian-Italian fusion cuisine, and he recently finalized work on his organic, biodynamic wine list. He’s getting noticed for it now: he won the City of Boston Green Business Award and the Chef of Chefs award at the green-minded Wine and Food Week. Duarte was also featured in a Wall Street Journal piece and a recent spot on FOX 25, both about green restaurants. Quiz him about his grease car as you settle down to a meal of octopus and cuttlefish in spicy Peruvian tomato sauce, salmon in Pisco blood orange sauce, or grilled skirt steak with fried yucca, topped off with a flute of limoncello.

Restaurant Week previews by Ryan Rose Weaver. Restaurant Week(s) run August 10-15 and 17-22.