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Water Ways.

Article Excerpt
By Amelia Levin, Contributing Editor

To charge or not to charge for house-filtered water? In a challenging economy, the answer isn't always clear.

Alice Waters' public announcement two years ago that she was banning bottled water at Berkeley, Calif.'s iconic Chez Panisse and serving tap to her fine-dining guests was a watershed moment for the green restaurant movement. Many fellow Bay Area restaurants followed suit, and so have others across the country.

But operators who want to satisfy both the environment (by not sending plastic bottles to landfills) and guests' desire for clean drinking water face a dilemma. Not only does eliminating bottled water dry up a lucrative profit source for restaurants, offering house-filtered water is hardly free. The vast majority of operators don't charge customers for water filtered in-house, so they must find other ways to recoup the cost of purchasing and installing the filtration equipment (which can run a few thousand dollars or more).

Some restaurateurs are reconsidering...

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