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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.