sustainability

With a little creativity, these restaurants and bars are fighting back against food waste Even for those venues that don’t advertise themselves as sustainable or eco-minded, sustainability is one of the most important elements of a business' operation. Times are precarious for everyone in hospitality - the industry is still feeling the effects of Brexit and Covid while also having to contend with the rising cost of living - so making sure waste is minimised means money isn’t going down the drain when it doesn’t need to. Of course, the environmental considerations are just as significant. Intensive agriculture is polluting the environment, shipping ingredients thousands of miles pushes carbon emissions up, and when food does go to waste, it produces methane, another major greenhouse gas, as it rots. Thankfully, there are kitchens and bars in the city that repurpose ingredients destined for the bin into something tasty and turn trash into treasure. Here are our fave Wasteless Wonders in London. 16. Pophams View this post on Instagram A post shared by LondONtheinside (@londontheinside) Given that Pophams is a bakery, it’s no surprise that the biz produces a lot of bread. Most of the sourdough that gets baked goes into producing lunchtime toasties but the ends of the loaves are too small to make them, and that means lots of leftover bread. The London Fields branch of Pophams (there are also bakeries in Islington and Victoria Park Village) flips into a pasta restaurant in the evenings and it’s here that Head Chef Rae Arends is able to put those leftovers to good use. She’s done things like adding breadcrumbs on top of some of the pasta dishes but as the toasties have gotten more popular, that just wasn’t using up enough of the bread waste. She’s created a version of pappa al pomodoro, the classic Tuscan bread and tomato soup, which uses 3 - 4 kilos of bread waste a week. Made with roasted winter tomatoes, oregano stock and lots of garlic and basil, the leftover sourdough is used to thicken the dish, and it’s served with burrata and olive oil on top. Not only does it taste like pizza in a bowl, it’s warming on those colder days whilst still tasting really fresh, and Rae can use summer tomatoes in the dish when they come into season too. Using up all that leftover bread makes sense from a cost perspective but it also pays respect to the bakers who work hard to bake such tasty sourdough every day. 15. Essi At Greek kitchen Essi (named after the Greek word for ‘you’), currently in residence at The Adam & Eve in Homerton, Kostas Vais is showcasing his take on Greek dining with an Aussie spin. That means he’s doing twists on classic Greek dishes, like taramasalata, and as well as adding Aussie ingredients into the mix, he’s also watching the food waste too. The white tarama dish, which has been a mainstay on the Essi menu since day one, is made in a fairly traditional way - cod’s roe, lemon, stale bread, water and oil - but it’s pimped with zhoug and Australian forest anise. And instead of being served with pita bread, like at every other Greek restaurant, it comes with insanely crispy, deep-fried potato skins for dipping. With four skins being served on each portion, the dip-to-product-that-you-dip-with ratio is on point. No wonder it’s a bestseller. View this post on Instagram A post shared by LondONtheinside (@londontheinside) The potato flesh that gets scooped out to leave the skins is used to make skordalia, a garlic dip, that’s served alongside whole mackerel, so no spuds are getting binned. 14. Camille View this post on Instagram A post shared by LondONtheinside (@londontheinside) Head Chef Elliot Hashtroudi is bringing regional French bistro dining to Borough Market at Camille - and he’s doing it the zero-waste way. Camille’s menu is dictated by the seasons, the ingredients that the British growers and farmers they work with produce, and Elliot’s whole carcass butchery philosophy. Whole animals from regenerative farmers arrive at the restaurant and then he breaks them down, ensuring that every single part of the animal gets used, whether it be veal sweetbreads (served with stuffed morels and wild garlic), ox heart (served as a haché with Cafe de Paris butter), mutton (minced into merguez) or pig fat (turned into lardo). From a whole pig, the head would be used for terrine, the shoulder might be minced for sausages, the collar served as chops, the belly cured and turned into charcuterie, the leg might become a schnitzel, the bones are used to make stock, the fat is rendered down for desserts, and the ears and trotters could be cooked into a Normandy-style braise. Charcuterie is a particularly good way of making sure all the elements of the animal get used, and it’s a very traditional element of French cuisine too. Cured pork belly with a black pepper crust is served with a grating of walnut to help cut through the fat, a great beginning to a meal alongside a glass of wine. Elliot also deep fries the pig skin until it puffs up and serves it with a tarragon emulsion and smoked eel as another of Camille’s popular snacks. As well as butchery and this style of nose-to-tail cooking being very much a part of Elliot’s background - his great grandmother had a butchers in Smithfield and he was sous chef at St JOHN - it’s cost saving for both the restaurant and the farmers. As Elliot says, "if we have just one customer come in at the end of the day and we’ve opened their eyes to offal or we’ve opened their eyes to zero-waste, it’s mission complete. For me, that’s why we’re here and what our purpose is in this industry." 13. Perilla Newington Green restaurant Perilla, co-founded by Ben Marks and Matt Emmerson, is known for its modern European menu and its innovative takes on classic flavours. It was one of the first places to popularise cuttlefish ‘bolognese’ and it also serves a savoury, low-waste version of ice cream and caramel sauce with its sourdough ice cream with mushroom salted caramel. Bread, specifically seaweed sourdough, is a big thing at Perilla. The kitchen makes loaves everyday (and goes through about 25 to 30 of them a day during the week, and more on weekends). It’s served with brown butter to start, it’s used in one of the snacks, yesterday’s bread soaked in moules mariniére with steak tartare, and any leftover trim gets used up in a dessert, so it really does bookend the menu. The leftover bread gets toasted and infused into milk to make the sourdough ice cream, and paired with another waste ingredient. View this post on Instagram A post shared by LondONtheinside (@londontheinside) Mushroom trim (generated from various other dishes on the menu), is saved up, cooked down and turned into mushroom butter, which gets added to caramel with cream and sea salt to create a mushroom salted caramel sauce. The caramel gets piped over the sourdough ice cream and any bits of mushroom trim that don’t make it into the butter get dehydrated into a powder, which gets dusted over the top. Though the sourdough ice cream doesn’t really vary too much, Head Chef Ben Brooke switches up the garnishes seasonally, ensuring that the kitchen is always making the most out of the produce that it’s got. 12. AngloThai View this post on Instagram A post shared by LondONtheinside (@londontheinside) John and Desiree Chantarasak, the husband-and-wife duo behind AngloThai recently won a Michelin star after only three months of being open, which tells you just how much attention to detail there is happening in the kitchen. The restaurant is inspired by John’s Thai-British heritage and celebrates the flavours of Thailand through the use of British and European ingredients, like the Cambridgeshire-grown winter radish used in the winter radish cake, vegetable treacle and tarragon dish. Inspired by the turnip cakes you’d find at dim sum restaurants, this radish cake is made from shredded and salted radishes that get compressed in a coconut press to extract all the liquid (that byproduct, essentially a salty radish brine, also gets reused to brine cabbages ahead of grilling). The dry radish pulp gets mixed with confit shallots, ginger, garlic, coriander and long peppercorn; bound with chickpea flour (sourced from the UK as a replacement for Asian-style starches like tapioca); and compressed for 24 hours into a firm dense cake that gets portioned up and deep fried (with any trim repressed to make more radish cakes). Once cooked, the radish cake gets glazed with vegetable treacle (a molasses-like liquid made from reducing veg trim that’s collected in the kitchen each day), a tarragon emulsion (to give an anise flavour like Thai basil), pickled radish discs and tarragon powder. It’s a very labour intensive process for what is essentially a couple of bites but it’s this dedication to extracting as much flavour out of each ingredient, sourcing the very highest quality produce from top suppliers and using it in its entirety that has earned AngloThai such plaudits. As John says, “it’s the only way to really be working when you’re at this level.” 11. Half Cut Market Islington wine bar Half Cut Market, founded by Danny, Holly, Edwin & Paul, has built a rep for being one of the best in the city, thanks to its excellent low-intervention bottle line-up and immaculate vibes. And now with new head chef Aidan Richardson (ex-Brat and Cafe de Parel in Amsterdam) in the kitchen, it’s doing some cracking food too. Aidan is a real advocate of using ingredients to their fullest - it’s demoralising when you end up putting produce in the bin and there’s something great about the challenge of looking at a byproduct and working out how to use it to level up a dish. His chicken and leek skewer, inspired by the jerk shawarma served at his local kebab house, is the perfect showcase for this philosophy. Chicken thighs get skinned and boned (the skin is rendered down into fat that then gets smoked and the bones are used to make stock) and marinated in a jerk paste made from fermented leek tops and fermented chillies. View this post on Instagram A post shared by LondONtheinside (@londontheinside) The marinated chicken gets threaded onto skewers along with the white parts of the leek, which have been cooked sous-vide in smoked chicken fat and smoked butter, and brushed with a soy tare made with ginger, brown sugar, star anise, allspice and a bit of the jerk marinade. Once that’s been grilled, the skewer is served with a chicken stock and soy tare sauce, housemade chilli oil, and a dusting of roasted leek powder made by slow-roasting the green tops to bring out notes of kombu, coffee and chocolate. The result is a supercharged take on a classic flavour combination. 10. Aulis View this post on Instagram A post shared by LondONtheinside (@londontheinside) With his Michelin-starred chef’s table restaurant Aulis in Soho, Simon Rogan brings a taste of Cartmel to the capital. Head Chef Charlie Tayler creates a tasting menu that celebrates Rogan’s sustainable, farm-to-fork ethos and features produce grown on Our Farm, Rogan’s organic, regenerative farm located just a mile away from his flagship, three-star restaurant L’Enclume. The farm is the driving force behind all of Rogan’s restaurants in the UK and it allows the various teams, including the one at Aulis, to use seasonal ingredients at their peak, with excess produce preserved to be used in creative ways throughout the year. One such way is in the drinks for the soft pairing option at Aulis, which has been created by restaurant manager and sommelier Charles Carron Brown. The Rhubarb & Lemon Thyme drink, served alongside a dandelion and pear dessert, is made from preserved Champagne Rhubarb from Our Farm that’s been juiced and infused with a lemon thyme syrup (made from dried herbs from the farm) and rooibos tea, which is charged with CO2 before serving. It's complex, elegant and proves that you don’t need booze to create an interesting pairing. 9. Dinings SW3 At Dinings SW3, Masaki Sugisaki operates a ‘gill-to-tail’ philosophy and makes it his, and his kitchen’s, mission to use every part of the various fish that features on his menus. Not only is this common in Japan, where often discarded parts of fish are considered delicacies, it’s a key way that he can minimise food wastage at the restaurant. This is exemplified by the way Masaki uses the whole turbot he gets in from Cornwall (which is netted, a more sustainable method of fishing). The main fillets and cheeks might be grilled; any meat left on the bones after filleting gets scraped off and made into a tartare; engawa, the outer fin muscle, gets turned into sushi served with ponzu vinaigrette; the roe is made into bottarga; and the head, bones and skin, which contain a lot of collagen, are heated with sake and kombu to make a stock that jellifies and can be used as an emulsifier along with yuzu juice and extra virgin olive oil to make a pil pil-style sauce. View this post on Instagram A post shared by LondONtheinside (@londontheinside) Even the fish fins stay out of the bin, getting turned into hira-zake, or fish fin-infused sake. After being dry-aged for two weeks, the dehydrated fins are toasted over charcoal and then infused into warm junmai sake. Following Japanese, and particularly kaiseki, tradition, the hira-zake is served with food, either alongside other turbot dishes to enhance their flavour, or with sashimi as the umami in the warmed sake complements the raw fish. And in the spirit of zero waste, the hira-zake can be topped up again with hot sake for a second flush. 8. Holy Carrot View this post on Instagram A post shared by LondONtheinside (@londontheinside) As a lover of fermentation, turning waste ingredients into something delicious has been a key part of Daniel Watkins’ approach to cooking for years, and it’s something that he’s putting front and centre at Notting Hill spot Holy Carrot. The team at the vegetable-forward restaurant save any peelings or waste and then look at how they can be repurposed, whether it’s drying something out to make a salt, smoking it to turn into an XO or a vinegar, roasting it for an oil, or fermenting it to become kimchi. It’s such a central part of the restaurant’s philosophy that Daniel has a fermentation cave in the kitchen, filled with misos, shios, kombucha, syrups, oils and pickles, 70% of which is made from byproducts, with even more containers and jars in the walk-in fridge. The menu at Holy Carrot is micro-seasonal, so Daniel works to make the absolute most out of ingredients when they are available, which is how the Delica pumpkin, almond ricotta and pickled walnuts dish came to be. Daniel takes all the offcuts and guts from the pumpkin and other squashes, roasts and smokes them to make a stock, which gets reduced down into a tare. That tare gets brushed onto pieces of pumpkin being cooked over fire, which are served on an almond ricotta (the pulp from this process also gets used, being turned into almond miso and almond shio) and topped with pickled walnuts and dried smoked squash flakes made from the trim (like a bottarga), and dressed with more of the tare. 7. Silo Led by Doug McMaster, Hackney Wick’s Silo is the world’s first zero-waste restaurant and the zero-waste ethos is embedded into every part of the operation. So as well as there being no bin in the kitchen, things like flour and butter are produced in-house, ingredients are delivered in reusable crates, the plates are made from plastic bags and the crockery is made from crushed wine bottles. Everything that comes into the Silo system gets used and anything that does leave, leaves as something useful, like compost. View this post on Instagram A post shared by LondONtheinside (@londontheinside) The Silo quaver, the first dish on the menu, is the perfect encapsulation of the restaurant’s ethos as it absorbs lots of the excess in the restaurant’s system, including byproducts of byproducts. Leftover solids from making sourdough miso (itself made from spent bread) and meta dairy garum (made from leftover dairy like cheese gratings and excess whey) are blended with tapioca starch to make a paste, which is spread on a tray, steamed and then dehydrated into a cracker. Once dry, the quaver is brushed with a treacle made from the week’s veg scraps and finished with grated Ragstone cheese. Any cheese that drips over the edge of the quaver is used to make more dairy garum and any leftover bits of the quaver are used to make tamari and miso, with the solid of that miso being used to make the next batch of quavers, making this a real infinity dish. Oh and it’s also incredibly tasty - cheesy, sweet, umami and just everything you could want from a giant crisp. 6. Roe View this post on Instagram A post shared by LondONtheinside (@londontheinside) Roe, like its sister restaurant Fallow, operates with a sustainable ethos, where surplus ingredients from suppliers are put to good use and as little as possible is discarded. Group Head Pastry Chef João and Roe’s Head Pastry Chef Kinsco had both spent time in kitchens (particularly Michelin-starred ones) where huge amounts of food would be wasted because it wasn’t perfect, which is something that they - and the rest of the team - work against at Roe. This philosophy coupled with an abundance of bananas (that have already travelled many miles to reach the UK) from suppliers helped inform the creation of the caramelised banana parfait, peanut and toasted vanilla dessert. Riffing off the flavours of a banoffee pie, the dessert uses all parts of the banana without anything going to waste. There’s a banana mousse filled with banana jam, banana caramel and a peanut choco nib sable (set in a custom mould making it look exactly like a peeled banana), a roasted banana and banana rum ice cream, peanuts, caramel sauce, and candied banana skins, made by softening them in sugar and acid and deep-frying. Not only does it look the part - the dessert went viral during the restaurant’s opening week - but it tastes mega too and has become the most popular pud on the Roe menu. 5. Saltine Modern European restaurant Saltine in Highbury has a cafe at the front of the space where people can pick up a coffee and a pastry in the mornings, but they don’t always sell out. The kitchen works to minimise waste wherever possible - like doing whole animal butchery and using seasonal ingredients - so instead of giving away or binning any leftover pastries, Head Chef Phil Wood turns them into a bread and butter pudding instead. Inspired by a dish he used to make when he worked at St JOHN Marylebone, he steeps croissants, morning buns and pain au chocolat in custard and madeira before baking, creating a rich, boozy and indulgent pudding that’s been a real hit with Saltine diners since it landed on the menu. View this post on Instagram A post shared by LondONtheinside (@londontheinside) Viennoiserie isn’t an easy thing to make, so the pastries are expensive even at cost price, and when costs across the restaurant industry are rising, it just makes sense to try and recoup as much of that expenditure as possible - and this is one tasty way to do it. 4. SOMA View this post on Instagram A post shared by LondONtheinside (@londontheinside) SOMA in Soho is the Kricket team’s minimalist take on a speakeasy, serving cocktails inspired by the Indian subcontinent. As well as looking the part (a little dark, a little mysterious, dominated by a nine-metre long steel bar), there’s a real effort on keeping the amount of waste produced as low as possible. The bartenders do that through some creative repurposing, like dehydrating leftover fruit skins and turning them into flavoured salts and pickling ingredients to be used as garnishes. The Banana, one of the first drinks created for SOMA, is a take on a banana daiquiri that makes use of the whole fruit. Banana skins are acidified until they turn black, to draw out their natural sweetness, and then made into a cordial along with a curry tincture. That’s then shaken with Discarded Banana Rum, itself a product that makes use of leftover banana peels, and finished with a cumin spray. 3. Apricity Chantelle Nicholson runs her Mayfair restaurant Apricity with a very clear purpose in mind - to operate in an as circular and sustainable way as possible, which is why it’s the holder of a Michelin Green Star. Every element of the business is optimised to achieve this, from using reusable crates for deliveries to saving paper with digital menus to cutting down on single use items (there’s no clingfilm in the kitchen and the team uses reusable piping bags and compostable vacuum bags). They also try and repurpose every scrap of food, either in staff food, in cocktails or in brand new dishes. View this post on Instagram A post shared by LondONtheinside (@londontheinside) The seeded cracker and ‘wasted’ dip is one such example of this philosophy; leftover bread crusts are soaked in water, spread onto a sheet, seasoned, spiced and baked until crispy, and served with leftover veg that’s turned into a dip. Not only is it great from a zero waste perspective, it also creates revenue from something that would have gone in the bin. The bar also has a sustainable ethos, using trims and syrups from the kitchen and pickling juice in place of citrus as it doesn’t tend to grow in the UK. The homemade sweet vermouth makes use of leftover red wine and turning by-the-glass options that wouldn’t last over the days the restaurant is closed into something usable and tasty. The wine gets cooked down into a caramel, spiced with things like chamomile tea and willow tree bark, and then lengthened with a fortified spirit like golden rum. It can be served as a drink in its own right but also appears in cocktails like Manhattans and Beetroot Negronis. 2. Acme Fire Cult View this post on Instagram A post shared by LondONtheinside (@londontheinside) After popping up in London Fields in 2021, Andrew Clarke and Daniel Watkins took their live-fire concept Acme Fire Cult permanent by teaming up with Steve Ryan of 40FT Brewery and opening a restaurant next to the Dalston brewery. The collaboration between Acme and 40FT is a central part of keeping the operation sustainable; as well as centring vegetables and using sustainably sourced fish and regeneratively farmed native and rare breed meat, the kitchen uses by-products from its neighbours in an effort to reduce waste. They also have a ferment room, headed up by Daniel, where the team are able to divert ingredients that would otherwise end up in the bin, like spent grain and leftover bread, so they can be turned into things like miso and nukazuke pickles. One of the best ways that the Acme kitchen repurposes waste is by turning leftover brewer’s yeast from 40FT into Acme ‘Marmite’. It’s saltier and more flavourful than regular Marmite, so it's put into butter, slathered over toasted day-old Dusty Knuckle sourdough (the restaurant’s other neighbour), and covered in pecorino. Not only does this dish encapsulate Acme’s ethos, it’s become one of their most popular dishes, with 40-50 portions going out during a busy service. 1. Spring As well as celebrating the best seasonal produce, Skye Gyngell’s Spring, located inside Somerset House, is committed to sustainability. Not only is the restaurant single-use plastic-free, Skye is fighting the scourge of food waste through the Scratch menu, which was first launched at the restaurant in 2016. The Scratch menu, served Tuesday - Saturday from 5.30pm - 6.30pm, is £30 and features three courses made from ‘waste’ produce. Things like pasta cut-offs, leftover bread, veggie tops, herb stems, egg whites, fish tails, and meat trimmings are transformed into simple, nutritious and delicious dishes. The menu changes daily as it’s dependent on what surplus produce is available, but it can include the likes of pasta rags with fennel outers and cauliflower leaves; lamb polpette with leftover beans, green stalks and pangrattato made from bread crusts; and meringue with spent rhubarb and citrus ice cream, made using rhubarb pulp and leftover citrus juices and peels, showing that perfectly edible ingredients that would normally go straight for the bin still have value. View this post on Instagram A post shared by LondONtheinside (@londontheinside) Want to see more Wasteless Wonders? The next video in the series will be dropping in July. Watch this space.

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sustainability

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It’s All About #DivedNotDredged Seafood at The Duke Organic

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A Garden Inspired by the Climate Crisis Is Opening at Kew Gardens

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