Elysian Bar Budapest has launched The Sustainable Documents — a free, annually released publication that brings together bars from around the world to explore one important sustainability topic per year. The first edition is out now.
Sustainability in hospitality is talked about constantly. What’s rarer is a resource that treats it seriously — not as a branding exercise, but as a practical framework for building a better bar. That’s exactly what The Sustainable Documents sets out to be. Initiated by Máté Szabó of Elysian Bar Budapest, the project is a free annual publication developed in collaboration with respected bars from across the globe, and it’s one of the more meaningful things the industry has produced in a long time.
What Is The Sustainable Documents?
Each edition focuses on a single sustainability theme, explored in depth through contributions from internationally recognised bars. The first edition takes on locality as structural design — approaching it not as a values statement, but as a real operating model for building more resilient, more distinctive, and more sustainable hospitality businesses.
The contributing bars for this first release are Little Red Door from Paris, Cato from London, Native from Singapore, and STIR from Ho Chi Minh City — alongside Elysian Bar Budapest as project initiator. That’s five bars, five very different operating contexts, all pointing in the same direction.
The document is free and publicly accessible. No paywall, no sign-up gate — just open knowledge, available to anyone in the industry who wants it.
Why It Matters
What makes The Sustainable Documents worth paying attention to is the ambition behind it. This isn’t a one-off white paper. Szabó has designed it as the first chapter of an ongoing annual series — a growing platform where each year’s edition builds on the last, and where the global bar community contributes to a shared body of practical knowledge.
It’s also notable that this is a Hungarian-initiated international project. That a cocktail bar in Budapest is convening venues from Paris, London, Singapore and Vietnam around a shared sustainability conversation says something about where the centre of gravity in bar culture actually lies right now — it’s everywhere, and the most interesting ideas are coming from all directions.
“The Sustainable Documents was created to be more than a single release,” says Szabó. “The idea is to build an annual platform that explores one important sustainability topic each year together with amazing bars from around the world. For us, this first edition is not the finish line. It is the beginning of something bigger.”
About Elysian Bar Budapest
Elysian Bar Budapest is a cocktail bar in Budapest known for its sustainability-driven approach — with a specific focus on locality, preservation, ingredient systems, and building a bar model where environmental responsibility supports creativity and commercial viability rather than working against it. Máté Szabó has been one of the more compelling voices in European bar culture on the subject of practical sustainability, and The Sustainable Documents is the natural extension of that work into something the wider industry can use.
The first edition is available now at elysianbudapest.com
