A Restaurant That Serves Gourmet Meals From Scraps
Source: Bloomberg, Alice Kantor
Photo: Silo London
Silo offers sustainable fine dining by throwing nothing away.
Almost every dish chef Douglas McMaster concocts contains the remnants of another. The fish sauce he drizzles over leeks for a starter on his current seasonal menu comes from boiling down cuttlefish remains; an entree that consists of potato, seaweed, and crème fraîche flavored with coffee and kombucha gets its hint of java from the husks of roasted coffee beans; and his dessert sandwich contains ice cream from the buttermilk left over from making butter, a wafer of wheat husks from bread-making, and a salted caramel-like syrup that’s the fermented prize of soaking surplus bread for two days.
McMaster is waging war against waste at Silo, which he opened as head chef in 2019 in East London’s hip Hackney Wick neighborhood. It continues the zero-waste concept of his first restaurant, in Brighton, England—also called Silo—which he opened in 2014 and closed to move to the capital. Silo London’s interior is designed with recycled or recyclable materials—the lampshades are made of seaweed, the bar of reused plastic, the cutlery holders of crushed wine bottles. Local farmers supply the ingredients and collect what diners don’t eat to make compost. McMaster uses every scrap he can in his dishes, which also feature invasive species such as crayfish. “We try to remove the human wasting component, such as using plastic or throwing too much food away,” McMaster says.
Food waste produces methane when it breaks down in landfills, and is responsible for as much as 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. Households are the biggest culprit, but the food service industry accounts for about 26% of the gases caused by food waste, the organization’s data show. And while no-waste cooking is on trend with diners expecting sustainable options, Silo takes the ethos to the extreme.
The focus on preventing waste was on display during a recent dinner service. Cooks used scales to measure ingredients, and they made real-time portion adjustments if they noticed customers leaving food uneaten. “I just told one of the cooks to put slightly fewer potatoes on the plates,” says Liam Colucci, a chef who was serving from the open-bar kitchen, which overlooks fewer than a dozen tables in the dining room. Each member of the small staff has encyclopedic knowledge of the dishes and the operations of the restaurant—and can preach its no-waste principles about as well as McMaster.
Silo is ranked 27th on the where-to-eat guide of the National Restaurant Awards, ahead of the more famous haunts St. John (where McMaster trained), Kiln, and the Ritz, and while it’s not in the main guide, it boasts a Michelin Guide green star for sustainability. A tasting of the entire menu—including smaller portions of the three starters, six mains, and two desserts—costs £59 ($74), plus the 12.5% discretionary service charge that’s customary in British restaurants.
It’s not easy being waste-free. Among the challenges are finding farmers and dealing with weather events that change crop yields and availability, and the occasional human error by suppliers, says McMaster. But reining in waste helps the bottom line, as well as the environment. An average-size restaurant in the U.K. loses about £20,000 a year on wasted food, according to the U.K. non-profit Sustainable Restaurant Association.
Although food service operations have recently made strides in reducing food and packaging waste, the pandemic reversed some of those gains as restaurants focused simply on surviving, says Noam Wolf, general manager of Marketman, which sells management software to the hospitality industry. Less than half of restaurant groups in the U.S. track food waste, and only 14% compost it, according to the National Restaurant Association.
McMaster’s methods are hard to replicate, but they serve to inspire consumers and the wider society to rethink their food habits, says Louisa Dodd, senior project manager at the Sustainable Restaurant Association. “Hospitality influences the household,” she says. “We turn to people like Doug McMaster when cooking at home.”