Could you run your restaurant without a bin?
That was the question that an environmental activist asked chef Douglas McMaster back in 2011 — and he's been trying to answer it ever since.
Today, he's the chef-patron at restaurant Silo — the world's first zero-waste restaurant.
Located in London, Silo was born out of a desire to create a sustainable restaurant that serves food made from scratch, using produce sourced from ethical growers — without generating any waste.
Silo is now a big source of inspiration to many other restaurateurs — including Lara Espirito Santo, who launched Lisbon's first zero-waste restaurant, SEM, with her partner George McLeod in 2021.
Episode 9 is all about a cutting-edge idea that’s fast becoming mainstream in kitchens around the world.
To understand why, we enjoyed a little trash-talking with both Douglas and Lara — and found out what running a zero-waste restaurant involves, why it could boost not just your creativity but your profit margin, and what kind of waste every single restaurant could easily stop producing right now.
Douglas McMaster: “I needed to rebel against — you know, this is such a punk thing to say — but I needed just to rebel against these systems because they don’t work.”
Lara Espirito Santo: “Sustainability in general, the minute that it becomes competitive advantage, it’s a zero-sum game. We’re all fucked. Sorry for the language.”
Hello and welcome to The Recipe — Superb’s podcast about the new generation of restaurants and the people behind them. My name is James Clasper, and in this month’s episode, we’re going to take a look at a cutting-edge idea that’s fast becoming more mainstream in restaurants around the world.
Douglas McMaster: “Essentially he said, ‘Could you not have a bin?’ And I had no idea what he was talking about. I vaguely knew that this building I was stood in was made out of waste materials. But you know, to be asked, ‘Could you not have a bin?’ — it was super, super abstract.”
That’s Douglas McMaster, whom we met in the previous episode about the MAD Academy, where he’s a visiting faculty member.
Douglas is also the chef-patron at Silo — the world’s first zero-waste restaurant. Now located in east London, Silo was born out of a desire to create a sustainable restaurant that serves food made from scratch, with produce sourced from ethical growers, while generating no waste at all. As we will soon see, Silo is now a big source of inspiration to many other restaurants.
Lara Espirito Santo: “To run a zero-waste kitchen, you have to be super-organised but like, people are like, how can you guys work without clingfilm? The answer is so simple: Lids.”
So in this episode, we’re going to hear how two zero-waste restaurants are trying to make a difference.
We begin of course at Silo. And to truly understand what first inspired Douglas McMaster, we have to go way back — to a time before he was even a chef.
Douglas McMaster: “Why I do what I do is largely defined by my relationship with institutionalised education. I quite enjoyed primary school, but secondary school, the bit where you start doing simultaneous equations and you have these kinds of key pillars of educational intelligence — so, like, Maths, English, Science, basically — that system wasn’t for me, and it isn’t for a lot of people. You know, there are eight, nine known types of intelligence and that schooling system champions two or three of those intelligences, and if you don’t fall under those two or three, then you’re not intelligent, you’re dumb. I had a really rough time with that system and just hated it — and hated myself as a result. You know, it was this real sort of like, “I'm so dumb.”
Now that, going into cooking, gave me a real sort of motivation to excel. I felt so worthless. It's like this burning fire in me that I had to extinguish and I don't know, it just resulted in going to the best restaurants. And again, you could say, “Oh, it's because you got a passion for food.” I didn't have a passion for food. I was raised on Turkey Twizzlers and Smiley Potato Faces. I was a chef because there was nowhere else to go.
You know, I wasn't educated and I love kitchens. That’s what I loved. I didn't love food at that age of that time. The motivation came from a place of personal disposition rather than a love of food. Every chef talks about their “passion for food and dah, dah, dah”, and it's just a bit formulaic and it's not the real reason we do what we do. There’s always more to it.”
Having left school at 16, Douglas became a chef and soon found himself working at a two-star restaurant in northern England and then at St John Bread and Wine, in London. In 2009, he was crowned BBC Young Chef of the Year, which led to stages at the likes of Noma and then to a job at one of the best restaurants in the world in Sydney — although Douglas has a very different word for it.
Douglas McMaster: “Monstrous, monstrous restaurant. I’d never seen a restaurant that was fine-dining at that scale. It was outrageous. It was a huge dungeon kitchen. It was 30 chefs in the kitchen at one time. There were gangs. So there were gangs in the kitchen, and that can create all kinds of animosity, all kinds of internal terrorism.
There were three sous-chefs. One of which was, in those days, a bit of a sworn enemy. An Australian guy, he just had it out for me. He had out for me hard. And his skill level was actually not so huge, which I think is why he had this kind of gorilla, primitive, marking territory and, you know, very aggressive behaviour and he would just constantly bark at me, constantly tell me that everything I was doing was wrong, humiliate me in front of everyone. And I knew he was wrong.
And then one day I was on the protein section, cooking quail. I can’t remember actually what he called me, but he called me something and I picked up a quail and I launched it and it smacked the side of his head. I’m not proud of any sort of violence and I certainly don't condone it. It was the most outrageous sort of moment of my career and it happened to happen right before I met Joost and I think there's something in that contrast — something so bad to something so good. My mind was so open at the point of meeting this incredible artist and idea.”
Joost is Joost Bakker — the environmental activist who the New York Times has called the “poster boy of zero waste living”. For the past 25 years, Joost has used multiple platforms — from art and architecture to floristry and design — to show how wasteful we are and to provide a better blueprint for living.
And in 2011, Joost constructed a building in Sydney called the Greenhouse. Made entirely from organic materials and running on renewable energy, the three-storey, two-bedroom “home of the future” was also zero waste.
Little wonder then that the Greenhouse drew a crowd — including a young British chef who had just had one of the worst days of his professional life.
Douglas McMaster: “I remember very vividly — the Greenhouse stood on the water and then you had the Harbor Bridge behind it and there was this snaking queue and it had just stopped raining and it was one of these tropical rains, so there was steam kind of coming up from the hot tarmac. I just remember that warm humid air and this loud rock-and-roll music playing. There’s thousands of terracotta pots growing wild strawberries on the exterior walls, a garden on the roof, and a big metal compost machine that looked like something from space outside.
And I think that going back to the institutionalised education, rebelliousness, it’s like I needed to not conform. I needed to rebel against — you know, this is such a punk thing to say — but I needed just to rebel against these systems because they don’t work. They don’t serve everyone. And I just had this need to rebel against — to rage against the machine — and that’s what I felt in this building, that distinct feeling that this is the beginning of the rest of my life. This is so special.
And then I met Joost and he’s got these insane blue eyes and he’s this Promethean god from the future. We talked about where I worked and I said St John and I did some stages in Copenhagen and there’s a lot of foraging and wild food, and painted this very brief picture of a chef that can butcher a whole animal and was super-creative and wild food made sense and dah, dah, dah, but then within that conversation, essentially he said, ‘Could you not have a bin?’
And I had no idea what he was talking about. I vaguely knew that this building I was stood in was made out of waste materials by that point. But, you know, system change, sustainability, zero waste — I hadn’t got a clue what any of that means. So. to be asked, ‘Could you not have a bin?’ It was super, super-abstract. You know, it was like, ‘What?’ And I was like, in my head, thinking, ‘Er, how did you not have a bin? Nose to tail cooking? Blah, blah, blah.’ And was just like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I could do that, yeah.’ You know, just saying yes, basically. And then that was it. That was where it started.”
In fact, Douglas and Joost teamed up the following year to launch the first version of Silo, in Melbourne. Two years later, in 2014, Douglas took the idea back to the UK, relaunching Silo in Brighton. And in September 2019, he moved the restaurant to Hackney Wick.
Today, to achieve zero waste, Silo comes up with creative ways to use everything that’s edible that comes into the kitchen — and more on that in a moment.
Meanwhile, all of Silo’s fittings are made from materials that would otherwise have been thrown away — tables are made from reconstituted food packaging, plates from plastic bags, and crockery from crushed wine bottles.
And all produce is delivered to Silo’s kitchen in reusable vessels.
All that has helped Silo achieve its goal of being zero waste. Well, almost.
Douglas McMaster: “The first 95 percent is actually pretty easy. Not easy, but it’s very achievable. It’s the last 5 percent that’s the bane of my existence. That 95 percent not having a bin is based on three very simple principles. Direct trade — getting things from nature or from its origin. Whole food preparation. You know, things that you need from nature. Everything comes from nature. Those things come in through your front door. You process them from whole. You get as resourceful and creative with the materials that you have. You know, if you process butter, churning cream, you have cream and then you've got buttermilk. You then, instead of tipping that down the drain or putting that into the compost bin, ideally you want to maximise that resource to minimise waste. So you would then turn that buttermilk into a buttermilk garum or a buttermilk miso or buttermilk dulce de leche for an ice cream. The idea in that whole food preparation is to maximise as much as possible.
And thirdly, it's closing the loop on the materials via compost. The organic waste that is inevitable — eggshells, plate waste — those things that are absolutely inevitable in any restaurant. It could also be turned into biofuel, so anaerobic digestion.
That attributes to let's say 95 percent of what would necessitate a bin — call it a recycling bin, call it a food-waste bin. So the last 5 percent — now this is the hard part — is really boring things that restaurants need that come wrapped in plastic. You know, the ink for a printer comes in plastic. Sharpies — those Sharpies are not compostable. They are not biodegradable. There are many imperfections within our system. Realistically we are 99.9 percent zero waste. That does include recycling. You know, the recycling bin is still a thing.
But the most radical example of the innovation in Silo is the glass. That’s the last 5 percent. That’s probably by weight 98 percent of that 5 percent because glass is heavy and we use a lot of glass. You know, the amount of wine we get from all over Europe, that’s a lot of glass. So with that in mind, that’s something that needed innovating. Recycling glass is okay if done properly, but it’s still a huge, huge impact on the environment. So I wanted to innovate, right? And so five years ago I did a lot of thinking. I was sat on Brighton Beach, which is made of pebbles, and it was a real sort of esoteric moment where I was sat on the beach, thinking about what to do with glass. And I was thinking, “Ah, this is not a sand beach.” You know, “What is sand, what is glass?” Glass is sand, or it's a silica derivative, and thinking, “Ah, interesting. What if we could turn glass back into sand? If we crushed glass into sand, what could we do with it? How could it be useful?"
And that was five years ago and since then we’ve worked with Potter's Thumb, my friend Mark Ciavola, and opened a pottery above Silo to process our waste glass. And this is an extreme example of the lengths we go to, to push the boundaries of sustainability. And we’re making plates, we’re making tiles, light fittings, we’re going to be making a sink out of wine bottles. So it’s just a radical example of how to close the loop on the materials that come in through our front door.”
As innovative as this approach is, surely more than anything else, diners want deliciousness. So the question is, how does Silo’s uncompromising approach square with that? Very easily, says Douglas.
Douglas McMaster: “There is this process of a whole ingredient being broken into many parts for different reasons. You know, you're extracting a primary cut or a primary part. And then all of the surplus products — a very dear friend, Matt Orlando, to quote him, “there is no such thing as a byproduct, it’s just another product”, and I love that and that's very core to this, what we're talking about — and it's like, what do you then do with all those other parts? And every part of every ingredient has potential, whether that's realised or not.
The idea is to create all these new products from byproducts within the system, whether that feeds back onto the same dish or the same menu or a menu in the future — you know, because a lot of these processes are slow: blackening, pickling, fermenting, preserving, dehydrating — you know, these processes are often slower, so don’t feed directly onto the menu. We have a dish where we cut the heart of the leek and we just steam it and we serve it with a cuttlefish garum, which is made with the waste from the cuttlefish that was on the menu months before, and then the tops of the leeks will be turned into an oil and that will go back onto the dish with the cuttlefish garum and the leeks.
So you can see two strains of processing, from the cuttlefish from a year ago and the leek that's immediate. So there's an immediate feedback loop of the leek byproduct and a very delayed feedback loop of the cuttlefish waste from a year ago. Some of these feedback loops and layers of processing — and something can go through so many different processes — reminds me of the film Inception where they are subject to these sleep states and they go through layers and layers of sleep and the further down through these layers, the more abstract it becomes. And sometimes the dish creation, certainly when you're trying to describe what this dish is, you're describing layers and layers of cooking reality — and it does get a little bit abstract.
We have these “Quavers”, which are like the third or fourth layer of processing, and it's basically a waste product such as buttermilk — buttermilk turns into a garum, we call it liquid gold, and then the solids, which is like 60 percent of that liquid gold mixture, the solids we’ll then blend it with tapioca, we’ll lay on a Silpat mat, steam it, dry it overnight, then cut it, fry it and then serve it as this puffed Quaver. We grate frozen goat’s cheese and sea buckthorn syrup. And that Quaver is like the waste of the waste of the waste of the waste. And it's just such a unique abstraction of a byproduct that it's delicious and creative and it just feels like the latter parts of the film Inception, where it gets a bit weird and they’re out walking up walls and stuff.”
Indeed, if all this is getting a little heady, let’s bring things back down to Earth — and to the bottom line in particular. After all, demonstrating that a sustainable restaurant can be financially viable is part of Silo’s M.O. Douglas’s description of how Silo’s zero-waste ethos increases its profit margin should make even the most cynical of restaurateurs sit up and take notice.
Douglas McMaster: “So in a typical restaurant, you have the building costs, that's like 30 percent. And then you have, the cost of staff is let's say 30 percent. This is looking at a very typical restaurant. And then ingredients, which are also 30 percent, leaving a 10 percent profit margin. Now that’s a really basic generalisation of what restaurants do. Now, Silo’s fixed costs are fixed. Staff costs, inevitably even at our finest, most efficient, leanest, staff costs are still higher than 30 percent. In fact, on average across eight years, it’s probably about 45 percent.
Then the other missing variable here is ingredient costs or material costs. Now, this is where Silo, or a zero-waste food system, has a lot of power or a lot of strength or merit. And that is because you’re working directly with the origin of food and things — you know, where things come from — you’re not paying for the so-called middleman. The person profiting isn’t the chef or the restaurant owner, it isn’t the farmer, it’s that middleman. That’s where the biggest profit is garnered.
Now, Silo doesn’t have that in our supply chain. We go direct with almost everything. Now there’s a lot of logistics in that as well that get complicated, but essentially food’s cheaper because it’s direct and also the farmers, you’re paying them more, which is great for them, great for agriculture. And the ingredients are whole. The cost of wheat versus the cost of flour is significantly different. You’re baking a lot of bread — the cost of a flour mill pays for itself in six months to a year, depending on how much bread you're doing. And that’s amazing. That really is amazing.
So essentially we’ve talked about staff costs going up 15 percent but food costs, historically, in Silo, instead of 30 percent, have been under 10 percent. In Silo Brighton, in the fourth and fifth year, it was averaging out at 6 percent of overall revenue, which was outrageous, like outrageous. Every scrap of everything was somehow feeding into the menu. It was a beautiful, beautiful symphony of zero waste.”
While Silo’s approach could — and should — inspire the next generation of chefs and restaurateurs, for Douglas, that isn’t the point. When I asked him if he was on a mission to change the industry, he said this.
Douglas McMaster: “All I’ve ever wanted to achieve is to bring an idea to life and do it really well. That doesn’t mean I don't have opinions about certain toxic ideologies. I think that the last, I don't know when it started, but let’s just say 30 to 50 years. on a societal level, we valorise elite activity, and that can be like “the best this” or “the best that", the best, the best, the best, the best, perfection, perfection, perfection. You know, how many times have you heard chefs talk about perfection? It’s toxic. It doesn’t exist. It does not exist. Perfection to one person is not perfection to another person.
I won't name names of awarding bodies, but it's like, “Who's the best, who's the best, who’s the best?” I don’t care. I don’t care who’s the best. And ideally, they would give a shit about the bigger picture, about the future, about nature. This unhealthy climb to the top of this pyramid of perfection is toxic and it's not good for anyone.”
Neither does he have any desire to scale up the business and open more Silos — despite, he says, many offers to do so.
Douglas McMaster: “You’ve got to ask yourself what is valuable to you in your life? What do you aspire to be? And for me, it comes back always to creativity. And the thing is when you scale something like Silo or a restaurant up, scaling up is like logistics, and there is creativity in that — there’s creativity in everything — but for me, it was more of an artistic creativity. For that to be maximised, it’s better in a singular site, in a site which can masquerade as an ecosystem. And within that ecosystem, it’s just this incredible kind of dance of creativity in innovation and supply chains and ingredients and harmony and circular thinking. It’s just this beautiful piece of art. And not a lot of people might see it as a piece of art but I do, and I just want to make that ecosystem as balanced and as effective and as elegant as possible. It’s a lifetime's work.”
That was Douglas McMaster, the founder of Silo in east London. And if he’s better understood as an artist than as a chef, then maybe his restaurant should be seen as an artistic school or movement, with chefs passing through its kitchen, exploring its ideas, and then reinterpreting them when they move on.
That’s certainly one way to understand the Lisbon restaurant SEM.
Voted the best new restaurant in Portugal last year, SEM is the brainchild of Kiwi chef George McLeod and his partner Lara Espirito Santo, who met in London and ended up cooking together at Silo.
I recently caught up with Lara, who’s originally from Brazil, and began by asking her how she and George would up in Portugal.
Lara Espirito Santo: “We kind of had the typical chef life in London. You know, we lived in an underground flat in Hackney with barely any windows and the idea of having to lockdown there was terrifying for both of us. We decided to come to Portugal just to kind of ride out the storm. We ended up doing this little summer residency here, did very natural food on the beach — you know, we didn't do anything too extreme or too radical, we just kind of brought a little bit of our philosophy and everything that we had learned so far. We then kind of realised that there was a real challenge here, we thought that there was an opportunity to actually generate impact.”
That meant opening SEM, a restaurant and wine bar whose name means “without” in Portuguese. Lara explains its ethos.
Lara Espirito Santo: “We do contemporary food but behind that, it is a project with a dual mission, a dual purpose — the main one being to fight food waste and the second one being to support regenerative agriculture. And the way the restaurant works, we have a very close relationship with a very select group of suppliers — our suppliers are our partners. We cook with what they have and that very much means that the food is subject to constant change. The menu is constantly evolving.
So that is how we view food waste. It’s about using a product in its integrity and its entirety, to use not only, you know, nose to tail and the entire fish when we do use fish but particularly root to flower, we’ve been focusing on that a lot. So we’ve been using and questioning and trialling things with parts of ingredients that are not normally eaten. And what is not used at that specific time is then preserved using traditional preservation techniques. Anything that might not be used immediately, we preserve them and create new flavours from them. The idea here is kind of to upgrade this food — upcycle this food and create something which has intrinsic value, whereas before it might have not. A carrot peel can be very easily used in a stock, but apart from that, what else can we do with the carrot peel? And we ferment it for a couple of days, dehydrate it, blend it into a powder and suddenly it’s a seasoning that can potentially add a layer of complexity to a dish.
We compost anything that is leftover in terms of big bones, stems, shells, anything that can’t be used or was actually not edible. We also do certain interventions at earlier stages in the food chain, dealing with that excess waste. Sometimes this means dealing with what our farmers have in excess. Sometimes it might be tomatoes that haven’t turned red because they were planted too late in the season or it can be using invasive species — we do try to do that as much as possible. And sometimes dealing with kind of failures of the food system as well. Like, for example, using whey from our cheese suppliers and things like that.”
If all that sounds a little like Silo, well, that’s hardly surprising. Perhaps the more interesting question then is, how does SEM differ from Silo?
Lara Espirito Santo: “Doug's book is called A Zero Waste Blueprint. You know, it’s like, this is how it can be done, right? It’s an operating model, you know, it’s something that can be applied in different ways. Our model differs from Silo’s because our reality is very different from Silo. We applied this model here and it works. The challenges have been a lot more on the infrastructure side, on the logistical side. We have zero single-use plastic. We only have reusable plastic. But with deliveries, it’s now at about 85 percent, I’d say, plastic-free because, you know, there are still things that people can’t understand. We get really beautiful stone-milled flour from the north of the country, but it comes through a DHL and they wrap it in plastic, you know?
So there are things that are real challenges for us, and things like, for example, we’ve been stepping away from using seafood. And we’ve been using lots of river fish. River fish here in Portugal exists in excess. We have beautiful rivers, beautiful fish, lots of invasive species when it comes to river fish. And no one wants to eat river fish in Portugal because it’s known for the seafood — specifically, cod, which comes from Norway, not from Portugal. But our fish supplier, we’re probably one of the few restaurants in Lisbon that does use his fish, so there’s no incentive for him to come, so he can’t deliver with any consistency to us.
It’s these challenges which are bigger kinds of infrastructural challenges that we’re trying to overcome, and we believe it’s possible, especially the more people get on board, the more people that are using some of these operating procedures that we do. This model and these things that we’re trying to develop, it can’t ever be competitive advantage. Sustainability in general, the minute that it becomes competitive advantage, it’s a zero-sum game. We’re all fucked. Sorry for the language.
The more people that are involved in it see the benefits of this model, which is a successful model financially as well, because you're not absorbing the costs of food waste, because you're controlling byproducts because we buy the cream and we make the butter there and we use the buttermilk and we use it to create other products that we sell —our food cost is genuinely low, and it can be a very successful model. You’re paying more for regenerative produce, but then you are saving more by not having food waste. There’s a huge benefit for the industry to apply this in many different ways. If you're not purpose-driven when it comes to the environment — which personally, I don't understand if you're a chef, but that’s personal — but if you're just profit-driven, there's still an incentive to applying some of these procedures, you know.”
Like any restaurant trying to make a difference, SEM is a target for cynics looking to pour cold water on its claims. But Lara has an interesting card up her sleeve.
Lara Espirito Santo: “I used to work before with social and environmental impact. I did a master’s in sustainable development and went on to work with monitoring and evaluation in big impact projects. So I’ve gone back to the beginning of my career. This is what I used to do before I cooked. So we’re establishing these metrics and defining these baselines of what we're trying to achieve, what we're trying to measure. Even though all the food that gets put in a compost bin is food that has been used, we’re measuring how much of that actually is being composited every week.
So, establishing these baselines, and creating the frameworks for monitoring this, is the next kind of big phase of the project. And we really believe that having these systems in place will make it easier for other restaurants, even if they're not applying the procedures yet, but it might be easier for them to at least start measuring their own impact and this is the biggest problem with our industry as a whole is, how many #sustainable restaurants are out there which we know are not, you know, and we know we’re doing more, but unless we can measure it and unless we can prove that we’re doing more we’re just the same, right? And in these conversations, I’m very open because we collectively can only learn if we say, “Hey, this is a huge challenge for us. Does anyone else have any other ideas?”
We have the same machine that Silo has for breaking the glass bottles. All of the wine that we serve, we keep the glass bottles and we crush them into a glass sand, and we're really struggling to find something that can be an interesting output for that material, for that resource. At the moment, we do have one — the sand gets mixed in with asphalt. It’s a very utilitarian use. I would much rather have this product being used for something that, again, has higher intrinsic value, right? I think that transparency is key because it is not our wish to be the only ones doing this. The more transparent we are about the challenges, the more solutions we’re going to get.”
Silo and SEM are by no means alone. Other zero-waste restaurants include Rest in Oslo to Terrà in Copenhagen. But what will it take to get more restaurants to sign on to this movement? I asked Lara what baby steps any restaurant take today if it wanted to.
Lara Espirito Santo: “Remove something that makes your life very easy. Remove the bin. Or remove clingfilm. We have a tiny kitchen, right? And to run a zero-waste kitchen, you have to be super-organised. But people are like, “How can you guys work without clingfilm?” The answer is so simple: Lids. You just buy lids. You buy good lids, you buy good containers, so it’s an investment in the beginning. But that’s it, you know? We never had any projects being damaged or losing quality because it wasn’t wrapped in clingfilm.
When it comes to the food side, you can always have a stock, right? Your stock is your safety net. You can keep all your food scraps and vegetable scraps and do a stock and you will at least give those peels a second life. But if you put yourself in a box and you define that, like, you cannot throw anything away, you’re going to start thinking of all the million things you can do with carrot skin, you know, instead of just putting it in a stock. And maybe one of them can actually go from something that has zero value and you’re just saving it from being completely discarded to actually having intrinsic value and adding something to either your dish or your profit line, depending on your incentive.”
At the end of the day, the purpose of zero-waste cooking isn’t just to create new flavours and boost a restaurant’s bottom line. It’s about something bigger still.
Lara Espirito Santo: “Restaurants and food makers in general, and people who are involved in this industry, they hold huge power of change, right? There is this kind of strategic position in the food chain where you're right in the middle. At one point, you know, you are raising demand, you are creating demand in the industry. You are influencing how your suppliers are rearing animals and how they're raising their food and producing their stocks. By raising those standards and by determining what you want, you have the power to influence how things are done at the origin, at the beginning of the food chain.
At the same time, you are also selling your product and through that, there’s also a huge power to show what can be done with food, with these things that you’re transforming. Because I firmly believe that when you encompass all the logistical side and all the distribution side and everything else that involves food, it is probably the worst industry in the world, in terms of environmental impact. And so us, you know, the people involved in this industry, have a responsibility, and this kind of choice to act.”
That was Lara Espirito Santo, co-owner of restaurant SEM, in Lisbon.
And I’m afraid that’s all the trash talking we’ve got time for.
You can find show notes on our websitealong with a host of other podcast episodes.
And tune in next month as we’ll have an exclusive interview with a key pillar at arguably Britain’s best restaurant.
Sam Ward: “The culture is built on how can we be a bit better than yesterday. I don’t want to like cryogenically save the restaurant. I’ve seen places that then go, “Oh, that was it, that was the thing, don’t touch anything.” I want it to keep moving forward and I want to keep going as if there’s a fourth star.”
But all that’s to come on next month’s episode of The Recipe.
Many thanks again for listening — I’ll see you next time.