Adam Handling on Ugly Butterfly: 'I want to prove that zero waste food can be beautiful'

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David Ellis @dvh_ellis13 November 2019

With new venture Ugly Butterfly, chef Adam Handling has told the Standard he’s determined to “prove that zero waste food can be beautiful” – and is preparing to operate the site at a loss to ensure his growing fleet of restaurants are all sustainable.

Opening today on the King’s Road, the new restaurant will donate two-and-a-half per cent of its revenue to the Felix Project, the charity which works to reduce food waste and feed the vulnerable. “As a company, we have forecasted a loss for this restaurant every six months, but this is our way of giving back,” said Handling.

Ugly Butterfly will seat just 24, with Handling and just one other chef in the kitchen, and will offer a short, regularly changing menu, using ingredients and plating dishes that the chef says wouldn’t otherwise fit into his existing projects, which include the fine-dining Frog in Covent Garden and his eponymous restaurant in Chelsea’s five star Belmond Cadogan hotel.

“As a group we’ve said we’ll only buy whole animals, so when I buy a whole cow, all the restaurant group says ‘what are we going to utilise from this?’

“Take wagyu beef – the shins are terrible, because the animal’s too heavy. You cannot use it at all in a braising dish. So you mince it. But what restaurant am I going to do mince in, in my restaurant group? I'm not going to be able to do that; someone doesn't pay that premium quality price to get a bowl of mince.

From trash to treat: Banana bread at Ugly Butterfly

“But now I can do it on the menu [at Ugly Butterfly] as a little shepherd’s pie. It’s £9, it’s made with pedigree wagyu beef, you know, it’s something I can serve and it’s something delicious, but it is what it is, Shepherd’s Pie. If I put Shepherd's Pie on in my Covent Garden restaurant, is that going to benefit me? Or is that going to make me look a little bit sh*t?

“So to have a new restaurant where the food is very simple and very natural, where the menu can change once, two times three times a week, it's perfect."

Other dishes on the menu are set to include puffed pork skins, as a bar snack, a tartare with beef from retired dairy cows, lobster shell soup and banana bread, made using bananas returned untouched from a guest’s room in the Belmond Cadogan. These ingredients will then be taken directly to the King’s Road by front-of-house staff. “So there's no carbon to this restaurant either,” said Handling, “I've bought the staff bikes, foldable bikes with little, I guess you’d call them delivery packs, and the team, they'll be cycling from the hotel to the King’s Road.”

Food with be served with a choice of 25 Champagnes or water, with no wine, beer or other soft drinks available.

“The food is luxurious to a degree, but at the end of the day, it’s still waste. The Champagne is the real luxury element for people – there’s a mix, lots by the glass. But this is somewhere you can get a bottle of Dom Perignon, a good vintage, at the £170 mark. It’s nearer £300 most places,” said Handling. As a wine region, Champagne is set to be fully sustainable by 2030.

The opening comes as part of a general trend towards sustainability in the industry, with the world’s first 100 per cent zero-waste restaurant, Silo, also opening today in Hackney Wick.

For more information, visit adamhandling.co.uk

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