5 December 2025

11:45 AM – 12:30 PM

Salle Proudhon

Samuel Trifot

For eight years, Samuel Trifot and his wife Ai Watanabe have been running Gili-Gili, their restaurant in Paris’s ninth arrondissement, dedicated to onigiri—triangular rice balls filled with fish, meat, or vegetables. Beyond promoting this iconic Japanese dish, every day they explore solutions for creating a more responsible and sustainable fast food industry, adapted to a world where resources are becoming increasingly scarce.

Contemporary restaurateurs: abundance or scarcity?

Contemporary restaurateurs operate in the midst of a striking paradox. On the one hand, there is artificial abundance: ever-full shelves, globalized products, endless displays on social media. An illusion of permanent profusion. On the other hand, there is very real scarcity: collapsed fish stocks, fragile agricultural resources, and climate change that threatens our food supply. Caught between these two extremes, restaurateurs are becoming key players, facilitators. Their role is no longer limited to feeding people, but to inventing new ways of doing so. How can constraints be turned into a driver of creativity? By promoting forgotten species, reducing waste, and educating diners about environmentally friendly eating. Faced with these limitations, their challenge is twofold: to maintain the pleasure and authenticity of the culinary experience while supporting a necessary food transition. Restaurateurs are thus called upon to reinvent the way we eat, giving new meaning to our choices and showing that gastronomy can be sustainable, responsible, and desirable.