Warm-toned oranges and deep blues make Shia’s bar area look like a sunset or sunrise upon entry. | Shia Inside celebrity chef Edward Lee’s groundbreaking restaurant in the Union Market district There’s more than meets the eye at celebrity chef Edward Lee’s new boundary-pushing Korean restaurant that joined D.C.’s booming Union Market neighborhood on Friday, November 1. Shia’s small, earth-colored space is a physical journey of sorts, transitioning from a 12-seat bar to a 22-seat dining room (and soon a semi-outdoor dessert lounge) as the seven-course tasting menu ($160) guides diners through the condensed restaurant (1252 4th Street NE). Beyond the food, Lee tells Eater that there is “a story that we want to tell about sustainability” along the way at Shia. The nonprofit restaurant is committed to being plastic-free, making its own menus and coasters from leftover paper, and even dehydrating its own trash to test sustainable alternatives for restaurants looking to contribute to a greener future. The memoir and cookbook author’s LEE Initiative nonprofit started as a mentoring program for women in the restaurant industry, turned into a COVID-19 relief fund with free meals for hospitality workers, and has now taken a sharp turn to sustainability with the arrival of Shia. “As a nonprofit, our goal is to share every innovation we have,” Lee explains. “This is supposed to be a place where we can create practical solutions for sustainability, so that other restaurants can use it as a blueprint.” The nonprofit arm tests all kinds of limited-waste practices in the high-end restaurant, moving through different phases of being zero gas, zero plastic, and reducing waste. All this experimentation and progress is measured and studied by a national research team of academics that will publish papers every six months or so, along with reviews of sustainable products from the team at Shia. Researchers from NYU to Stanford are part of the project, and a research assistant studying environmental science at George Washington University will monitor progress and essentially become part of the restaurant team. “She’ll be spending time in the restaurant every week, collecting data,” says Lee. “She’ll be here, you know, three, four times a week ... keeping us on our toes to make sure that we’re doing the right thing too.” Shia Curved edges surrounding green dishware and brown couches make the dining room feel like it sprung out of the earth. The effectiveness of each practice (like how long glass bottles last over plastic ones) and the cost of each swap (the cost of turning old wine bottles into plates over buying plates) will be painstakingly documented in order to track tangible results. Diners can hear about the small environmentally-minded practices throughout their meal — like the bamboo pens that took months of research or the paper machine that turned Shia’s liquor license sign into the first menus — but they also have the choice to completely opt out of the conversation. Instead, they can just enjoy the classic-with-a-twist Korean food from Lee, who just won second place on the South Korean cooking competition show and international Netflix hit Cultural Class Wars. Inventive, yet simple dishes will use seasonal produce accentuated by high-quality Korean ingredients that are slowly brought stateside by boat instead of a fuel-guzzling plane. Highlights of the current food on the constantly evolving menu include a pine nut, tofu, and apple Korean porridge topped with Maryland crab and a tuna-encased ball of layered bibimbap crowned with caviar and a runny quail egg, which Lee famously made a version of for one of the final rounds of the Korean cooking show. Shia The soondubu, pine nut, and apple-based juk (Korean porridge) Shia Tuna-wrapped bibimbap represents chef Ed Lee’s Korean-American upbringing. As the culinary director and head chef of esteemed spots like Succotash, Lee knew he wanted to do fine dining, but struggled to get the backing for a nonprofit restaurant based around tasting menus. “Most nonprofit restaurants, in the United States anyway, are places that do really good missions, but I would say, are not the best restaurants,” Lee says. “So the uphill battle was that we had to convince people, ‘no, no, no, it’s a nice restaurant.’” Breaking down that stigma around nonprofits and bringing in donors like OpenTable, Chase Bank, Edens, and the Asian American Foundation was a process. But Lee was adamant that a nice restaurant could practice the “art form” of fine dining while still be “socially responsible and help the community.” The only problem now, Lee said a few weeks before the opening, was actually getting people into the hidden-away space marked by a small door between Blue Bottle Coffee and the bright shops on 4th Street NE that lead to La Cosecha. “At the end of the day, we also need to be a good restaurant, because we need to be full,” he explained. “We need customers. Because if you don’t have customers, you don’t have real data.” That doesn’t seem to be a problem, with the reservation-only spot solidly booked for two full-house seatings each night until mid-January and at least one food influencer coaching curious customers on how to get a last-minute open table at the barely two-week-old restaurant. Over time, as Shia gains more notoriety, Lee also plans to work with delivery and restaurant supply corporations to create “an alternate way to do things where it’s productive” — like making sure shipments come in plastic-free packaging. At the end of the day, Lee simply hopes to make a small mark on an evolving industry. “We’re not gonna change the world with one restaurant,” he says. “We can move the needle, and we can start a dialogue, and we can start getting the word out that this is important. Yeah, it’s time consuming, but it’s not that hard.” Shia Chef Edward Lee builds a bossam (boiled pork shoulder) dish with his small kitchen team.