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London’s most sustainable restaurants

All good restaurants pay close attention to what goes into their food — but increasing numbers of chefs and restaurateurs are just as concerned about what their food does to the outside world.

More people than ever are counting sustainability as a key part of eating out, and more London restaurants are reacting by adopting renewable approaches to gastronomy.

Good thing too — sustainability association Too Good To Waste estimate that London restaurants waste a staggering 600,000 tonnes of food every year, which is an awful lot of leftovers.

Thankfully many restaurants are cleaning up their act, supporting causes like the Evening Standard’s Last Straw campaign and even serving vegetables grown in “Michelin-starred” compost.

From zero-waste eateries to restaurants serving offcuts for Sunday lunch, these are the best sustainable restaurants in London.​

Cub

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Cub is the joint venture between cocktail legend Ryan Chetiyawardana and chef Douglas McMaster. The latter earned a reputation for sustainable dining at Brighton’s zero-waste restaurant Silo, which is moving to Hackney Wick later this year. As well as purchasing their food from renewable sources, Cub’s interior is also made from reused materials. The tables are ingeniously crafted from recycled yoghurt pots, while the air inside the venue is filtered through the breathable clay used to construct the walls. The food is absolutely delicious too: fellow Silo alumni Michael Thompson is head chef, and serves dishes such as confit Jersey Royals with fermented potato, whey and mustard, as well as kid goat with spring greens and wild garlic.

153 Hoxton Street, N1 6PJ, lyancub.com

Roganic

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Sustainability isn’t just for hippy vegan cafes – it’s a movement the fine dining world is embracing too. At Michelin-starred restaurant Roganic, chef Simon Rogan uses ingredients largely from local suppliers, or from his own farm in the Lake District. The eco-friendly drive, however, doesn’t stop there: the farm swaps big machinery for low energy hand tools, using scythes, hoes and broadforks. The produce also goes full circle – waste from the restaurant is turned into compost and used on the farm.

5-7 Blandford Street, W1U 3DB, roganic.uk

Spring

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Skye Gyngell’s Spring at Somerset House goes further than most organic and sustainable restaurants and offers a menu designed specifically around surplus produce. The pre-theater “scratch” menu is made from ingredients that would otherwise have been wasted, and at three courses for £25 it’s an affordable way to support a good cause. The daily changing menu is only revealed on the restaurant’s social media about an hour before it's available – which is only between 5.30-6.30pm – but the sample dishes hint at the likes of braised lamb shank with polenta, spinach and fennel top salsa and a chocolate Swiss roll.

Somerset House, Lancaster Place, WC2R 1LA, springrestaurant.co.uk

Bean & Wheat

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Bean & Wheat’s feature in this list doesn’t signal just one sustainability-focused establishment, but two. The Hoxton cafe is owned by chef Adam Handling, whose acclaimed restaurant Frog Hoxton is just round the corner – coincidence? Not at all. Bean & Wheat is a cafe and beer shop which uses surplus ingredients from Frog and turns them into breakfasts, lunches and sweet treats for sale. For instance, the limes which are juiced for Handling’s signature celeriac dish “Mother” are then confited and turned into a Bean & Wheat sorbet.

321 Old Street, EC1V 9LE, beanandwheat.co.uk

Kanishka

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Shortly after opening his new Mayfair restaurant Kanishka, Michelin-starred chef Atul Kochhar introduced Zero-Waste Sundays – monthly lunches made with offcuts from the restaurant’s main menus. The surplus ingredients are vacuum packed and frozen, before being reformed as parts of a £25, three-course menu on the last Sunday of every month. To top it all off, proceeds from the lunch go towards Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital.

17-19 Maddox Street, W1S 2QH, kanishkarestaurant.co.uk

Native

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Native is serious about staying sustainable. As the name betrays, Ivan Tisdall-Downes and Imogen Davis’s restaurant is focused on British produce, but its hyperlocal attitude extends to foraging locally for ingredients on a daily basis. It’s also a zero waste kitchen: everyday the menu starts with a snack that has been created by chefs purely from the offcuts of previous day. The restaurant also uses only sustainably sourced fish and meat, alongside fruit and vegetables purchased daily at nearby Borough Market.

32 Southwark Street, SE1 1TU, eatnative.co.uk

Caravan

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Caravan cares about its coffee, but also the waste our caffeine habit can produce too. The restaurant and coffee stalwart uses only takeaway cups that can be recycled up to seven times, and gives customers a 50p discount for bringing a reusable cup. Caravan also works with Pale Green Dot, a company which collects all its organic waste – including coffee chafe – from across all its locations and turns it into compost for local farms. Innovative cooking sees waste products reused in house: the whey from its burrata is used to make the restaurant’s lacto-fermented soda drinks. The restaurant group also made the move in 2017 to remove beef from its menu, and focus more on vegetable-focused dishes.

Various locations, caravanrestaurants.co.uk

The Duke of Cambridge

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Pub fans are spoiled for choice when it comes to boozers in Islington, but the Duke Of Cambridge offers something unique. The St Peter’s Street setting is Britain’s first certified organic pub, with its focus firmly on serving sustainable food. Absolutely all of the ingredients used in its kitchens are organic, and never imported via air freight or grown in heated greenhouses. In addition, any surplus food is collected and processed through an anaerobic digester, which turns the waste produce into energy. Dishes include chicken sourced from the organic Rhug Estate, served with escalivada and garlic cream, as well as a ricotta and ewe’s milk cheesecake.

30 St. Peter’s Street, N1 8JT, dukeorganic.co.uk

Gourmet Goat

(Melissa Thompson)
(Melissa Thompson)

Meat-centric endeavours aren’t initially a go-to when it comes to sustainable eating, but Gourmet Goat is a marked exception. The Borough Market stand is aiming to change the way the British public perceive goat meat – a largely maligned food stuff that isn’t just edible, but darn tasty. It’s kid goat kofte wraps use meat from surplus billie goats from the UK dairy industry, looking to combat the fact that tens of thousands of male goats are killed every year shortly after birth. Gourmet Goat champions eating better quality meat less often – and switching low quality beef for high quality goat is an environmentally friendly swap.

Borough Market, Rochester Walk, SE1 9AF, gourmetgoat.co.uk

Mercato Metropolitano

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So Mercato Metropolitano isn’t a restaurant – but it is a market made up of more than 40 food traders. And while food is important here, it shares the top of the priorities list with sustainability and community. The market works with Too Good To Go, a platform that helps traders sell off surplus food that would otherwise be thrown away, and has banned all single use plastic from the site. This means water refill points are accessible across the market to encourage reusable water bottles, and recycled glass bottles are used by traders.

42 Newington Causeway, SE1 6DR, mercatometropolitano.com