Events Archive
Festival and Street-Food Sustainability Workshop
When: Tuesday 8 May
Where: New Covent Garden Market
Ethical Eats, in conjunction with Sustain’s Food Legacy project, ran a half-day workshop for festival and street-food caterers looking to learn more about building sustainable food principles into their dishes.
The event kicked off with a tour of the New Covent Garden wholesale market, where attendees were introduced to market suppliers, and tasted some of the produce on offer. The tour was followed by sessions on: using local and seasonal produce; sustainable fish higher-welfare meat; waste; and healthy catering. An ‘ask the experts’ panel, featuring speakers such as Petra Barran from Eat St, George Clark from the Sustainable Restaurant Association and Ian Fielder, festival manager of The Green Man Festival, covered topics such as managing costs, working as collective, and communicating good food credentials. Over lunch stallholders had the opportunity to network and to ‘meet the suppliers’, with a selection of local-to-London producers showing off their produce. Suppliers present included Chegworth Valley (juices, fruit and veg), Flour Station (bakery), Kappacasein (cheese), London Glider Cider, Peros Ltd (Fairtrade items), Cultivate London (community-grown salad and herbs) and Dalston Cola. A delicious lunch was made by Cristiano and Kirie from street-food trader Tongue n’ Cheek.
A set of Festival Food Guidelines, which highlight the issues and provide practical solutions for festival and street-food traders, were launched at the event.
Nose-to-Tail workshop
When: 6th March 2012
Where: Central Street Cookery School, Islington
Ethical Eats brought chefs from all over the city together with butchers, culinary experts, and local caterers, to learn about animal welfare, the energy issues associated with livestock farming, to explore whole animal butchery, and try some cooking with lesser-used cuts.
Alan Stewart of Manson Restaurant, and butcher Nathan Mills, of The Butchery, demonstrated their skills breaking down the Gloucester Old-Spot, provided by Billfields of London, before helping the participating chefs have a try.
Buying a whole carcass, means you are able to “offer value to the customer”, said Stewart. “It becomes cheaper and more interesting for them. And it makes financial sense – I can’t imagine doing it any other way,” he said. “Ordering a leg on its own is expensive – but when you order the whole animal, that leg becomes relatively cheap.” Echoing this notion, Mills added, “making money from the ‘body balance’ – those parts that aren’t normally included in your order – and building that relationship with your butcher can be rewarding for you both.” To chefs weighing the benefits of ordering a whole animal, Stewart suggests incorporating some dishes with different cuts into the weekly ordering plan. The savings accrued when ordering the whole animal, including those less popular cuts can then be passed on to the customer.
Adopt-a-plot showcase event
When: 17th January 2012
Where: The Table Café, Southwark
Ethical Eats teamed up with Capital Growth, the campaign to get London growing, to offer restaurants the opportunity to 'adopt a plot' at their local community food-growing space.
Chefs and restaurateurs met with growers in order to discuss desirable varieties, supply logistics and pricing for the coming summer, and to gain an understanding of how each other works in order to establish hyper-local vegetable supply relationships.
Going back to our roots: chefs invited to trace a vegetable’s journey from farm to market
When: 08 July 2011
Where: New Covent Garden Market and Laleham Farm, Middlesex
Chefs, restaurateurs and caterers doned their wellies for a day at Laleham Farm in Middlesex and London’s New Covent Garden Market. Laleham Farm is a LEAF (Linking Environment & Farming) accredited vegetable farm, committed to maintaining a variety of habitats for wildlife by practising environmentally-responsible farming methods. The farm supplies menu-inspiring produce such as ruby chard, cavolo nero, fennel and kohlrabi to both the local and London markets. The purpose of the day was to give catering professionals the opportunity to learn more about the practicalities of sustainable farming methods, and see for themselves how fresh, local produce is hand picked and packed on the farm before arriving at the London market less than 24 hours after harvest. Attendees were given an early morning tour of New Covent Garden’s Buyers Walk, then transported to Laleham for a farm walk led by grower Charlie Bransden. The visit finished with lunch at a local pub, featuring super-fresh produce from the farm.
London Honey Festival
In a UK first, restaurants across London served up the Capital’s honey this summer. In a link-up with the Capital Bee campaign, restaurants were connected with local beekeepers and encouraged to put ‘London Honey Specials’ on their menus in celebration of the London Honey Festival. A staggering half a tonne of urban honey 18 apiaries was made available to restaurants including: Caffe Caldesi, Dishoom, Eden Caterers, The Three Stags, Roast, Skylon, The Table Café, L'Eau a la Bouche, The Charles Lamb and Drake & Morgan.
http://www.capitalgrowth.org/bees/
Vegetarian Restaurant Ramble
This event - where three courses were served at three different ethical eateries - was aimed at raising awareness of the great things London's restaurants are doing to reduce their environmental impacts (for example using small-scale local producers), and to highlight to diners that reducing their meat consumption is one of the simplest and most effective things they can do to improve the sustainability of their eating choices. The journey began at Tibits on Heddon Street, where ramblers piled their plates with sumptuous veggie starters from the ‘food boat’. This was a buffet with a difference – local and organic food is at the heart of Tibits' philosophy. Diners were then be treated to a VIP experience at the Soho vegetarian institution that is Mildreds. Serving up top class food since 1988, Mildreds knows a thing or two about vegetarian cookery, and is popular with veggies and omnivores alike. The main courses were served in the private dining room and featured organic ingredients from small-scale suppliers, accompanied by organic wine. Diners were then transported to the final stop, Saf in Hoxton. Voted London's best vegetarian restaurant by the Evening Standard in 2010, and with a focus on food that promotes wellbeing, Saf was the perfect place to end the tour with pudding and a digestif.
Sustainable Fish Workshop
Sustainable seafood was the flavour of the day at the Billingsgate Seafood Training school on 2 March 2011, when over 40 chefs, caterers and restaurateurs attended a sell-out event jointly organised by Ethical Eats and the Good Catch sustainable seafood initiative, with the support of Sustainable Fish City. The training day started with an early morning tour of Billingsgate Fish Market, where chefs got the chance to meet seafood traders and see the incredible range of fish and shellfish on offer at the market. Attendees were also put to the test with a blind tasting, and challenged to ‘name that species’ – not as easy as it sounds! Lesser-loved fish species such as dab and gurnard proved popular with the chefs, who said they’d be interested in trying them out on their menus as tasty and often cost-effective alternatives to popular species that are currently under pressure – cod, haddock, salmon et al.
