Zero Waste Dining

Brighton’s newest restaurant SILO has adopted an interesting slant on sustainable behaviour by utilizing a pre-industrial food system which generates zero waste. Sounds great, but what does it mean?

“Today’s food industry is in a mess. Half of the world’s produce is wasted, and the food we eat is so plastic, it’s actually worse than waste itself,” says Brighton’s newest restauranteur, Douglas McMaster, joint owner of SILO.

SILO chooses to provide quality through purity, applying this ethos to determining their menu right down to how they source their ingredients. They operate as a bakery and coffee house as well as a restaurant, obtaining products from a wide network of sustainable producers, such as coffee roasters that only use beans delivered by sailboat, or take matters into their own hands by fermenting beer and vinegar, and growing mushrooms on-site. If the reviews popping up on the internet are anything to go by, this is not a bad method.

SILO pride themselves on totally eliminating waste from their operation. They have opted for direct communication with farmers, sourcing local ingredients, employing re-usable delivery vessels, even the receipts are emailed to customers to prevent paper wastage. Any leftover food is added to a composting machine, so even the useless scraps are given a purpose. The interior is made from repurposed materials, such as used school furniture and scaffolding shelves, which create a trendy, understated dining environment.

Of course, pedants could pick holes in the set-up of SILO, such as the use of electricity, the fact that their entire menu isn’t vegan or that it’s nothing more than a pretentious gimmick. On the contrary we think it’s a great initiative, a sterling attempt at creating greatly needed, “greener” restaurants and is it not better a bit of pretension than boring mediocrity?