Restaurant Beatrice Is the First B Corp Certified Restaurant in Texas

Restaurant Beatrice has set the bar for sustainable practices in DFW hospitality since it opened in 2022. Its innovative farming practices at its launch, partnering with the South Dallas urban farm Restorative Farms (it now works with Black-owned Joppy Mama farm) were a noteworthy early story. It also established a Gulf seafood program available to all restaurants serviced by Ocean Beauty Seafoods and that included the first woman-owned oyster farm in the Gulf of Mexico. And it has been piloting a composting program with the city of Dallas that could spread food composting services city-wide in the future.

Since opening, chef/owner Michelle Carpenter and co-owner Hanh Ho have been working toward a certification from B Corps, which is part of a universally recognized measurement system that gives the restaurant — or any business — a tangible way to measure its impact in areas including sustainability and inclusiveness. Highlighting how this restaurant impacts its community and employees is a part of its mission statement. In a press release, the restaurant’s general manager, Ramona Isaac revealed that Restaurant Beatrice has completed its certification.

It is the first restaurant to receive the certification in Texas and only the sixth in the U.S. In addition to sustainability practices, the restaurant has also introduced a women in leadership program in conjunction with Dallas College for hospitality workers. It publishes updates about its practices on social media and in newsletters to diners.

“We didn’t have anyone in Dallas, Texas, the country — no one that we knew has gone through the process for restaurants. We were making a pathway that was not laid out,” Carpenter says.

It wasn’t an easy path — the restaurant was rejected after their first submission and realized they needed to educate B Corps on issues such as how Cajun and Creole food was representative of and related to Black culture for its social impact measurements. The restaurant solicited help from the Louisiana Tourism Board, Dallas College senior director of workforce initiatives Steve DeShazo, OpenTable, the James Beard Foundation, and Eater. They also worked with a former B Labs analyst, Jeffrey D. Stewart, a certified B Lab consultant who is Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) certified, to measure its carbon footprint (corporations including Southwest and American Airlines also use GRI measurements).

The employees at Beatrice are also a huge part of the effort, from bartenders who make syrups and stocks in-house to servers and chefs who scrape leftovers into the correct waste containers and educate guests about sustainable menu items.

As part of its certification, the restaurant is required to publish a public impact report and changed its articles of incorporation with the state of Texas to become a public benefit corporation.

“The process was full of trials and tribulations, but this is just the beginning. We need other businesses to be engaged,” Ho says. “You don’t have to use B Corps as the standard, but it can help guide you. It requires a lot of data, and that transparency is what is needed.”

“I like that it requires information to be open source and shared,” she adds. “When we do something sustainable, we’re not making it our secret sauce.”

Ho says she’s already seeing the certification make an impact. “Some of the women in our leadership class are asking questions about getting certified and that’s the point. I’m giving them information now that we’ve cleared that pathway,” she says.

Restaurant Beatrice was a James Beard-nominee for Best New Restaurant in 2023 and was Eater Dallas’s Restaurant of the Year for 2022.