Using every last cut

Anglo restaurant in London’s Farringdon area had been recommended to me by a chef-turned-brewer who uses foraged materials in his beers at the aptly named Earth Ales brewery, recently relocated from London to the Oxfordshire countryside. We’re talking dandelion root in his stout, hogweed in his Weiss beer and lemon verbena in his excellent pale ale.

?Anglo restaurant interior

It did not surprise me to find the menu at Anglo – a fixed nine-course affair – leaned heavily on foraged ingredients along with seasonal produce, the judicious use of fermentation to help juice up the flavours of the raw materials and a focus on local sourcing (yes, even in London it can be done).

Foraging, seasonality and locality is nothing new of course, but it struck me that in these times of rampant inflation, there is now an imperative to focus on these elements in order to potentially reduce the input costs of restaurants. What Anglo also reduced to a minimum was its use of expensive proteins. Across the courses, there was only a small portion of Scottish salmon and a similar sized cut of lamb.?

Did this affect the meal adversely? Not one jot. Quite the contrary, in fact, as the stars of the show were a roll call of what I understand to be relatively inexpensive raw materials including cauliflower, seaweed, broad beans, purple sprouting broccoli, oyster leaf and British buckwheat. What made them stand out was their intelligent and expert use by the chef. The skill in the back room was what I was really paying for, not some imported expensive meat.?

I’m not particularly interested in paying for a variety of expensive ingredients just for the sake of it. I can understand why people would be demanding of having rich ingredients on the menu at higher end restaurants – I’m thinking truffles, lobster, Wagyu beef, caviar and even that ridiculous thing, gold leaf. But they are expensive to start with, so by the time the kitchen has done its work, the costs start to properly escalate.?

What concerns me more is that these items will often have been sourced from far afield, and all too frequently be out of season. The restaurant industry at the top end still sits alongside other luxury sectors in that the perception is often at odds with sustainability. Thankfully this scenario is gradually changing, and top chefs like Simon Rogan are taking a more holistic view of their propositions, and at the heart of this is ingredients.??

He has always had an eye on sustainable sourcing, and today, what would have been food waste from his kitchen is being repurposed into key ingredients in other dishes as well as being used as key components of cocktails. For instance, at his Roganic Hong Kong restaurant, pineapple cores and lemon skins from the staff breakfast are used in the tepache, a Mexican lemonade infused with pineapple.

?Skye Gyngell of Spring

Skye Gyngell has long been a pioneer of utilising ingredients that would be heading for the bin and uses trimmings and off-cuts at her Spring restaurant within the dishes on the early evening Scratch menu, which is a bargain at ￡25 for three courses.?

Don’t think it is just at the top end where the clever use of ingredients is becoming recognised as a way to potentially enhance the profit and loss, and not just as an exercise in ticking the sustainability box. Josh Eggleton of the Pony Restaurant Group interestingly converted his Chicken Shed concept in Bristol to Root. Disillusioned that diners only wanted a chicken wrap or fried chicken sandwich, he overnight switched the focus to predominantly serving cleverly cooked vegetables, with proteins playing a secondary role.?

The consideration of ingredients and menu composition is something every foodservice operator will have to study increasingly closely, because with the prices of all raw materials, along with every other input cost, still on the upward escalator, there is only so much that the price points across existing, long-standing menus can be pushed up before there is some widespread resistance from customers.

Glynn Davis, editor of Retail Insider?

This piece was originally published on Propel Info where Glynn Davis writes a regular Friday opinion piece. We would like to thank Propel for allowing the reproduction of this column.