Doug McMaster on Silo: 'I’ve gritted my teeth because I believe so passionately it has to exist in the world'

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Chef Doug McMaster never uses a bin. He explains this between sips of kombucha, sat on a bench outside the Crate Brewery in Hackney Wick. In front of him is a floating cocktail barge; behind is a building site which, by the end of the week, will have been tidied up into McMaster’s first London restaurant, Silo.

The bin thing is central to McMaster’s commitment to sustainable dining. When it opens on Friday, Silo will be the world’s first zero-waste restaurant, meaning the kitchen will either reuse, repurpose or recycle everything, and won’t throw away a thing.

McMaster composts any unusable food through an anaerobic digester, which can generate up to 60kg of compost in just 24 hours, ensures no plastic or polystyrene is anywhere in the Silo supply chain, mills flour on site and works directly with farmers for his ingredients. Plates are formed from plastic bags and the chefs will cook with commonly rejected ingredients, including dogfish, so unpopular some fishermen still consider it a pest. They used to use its rough skin to polish wood.

“I’ve figured out a way to make it work and I’ve gritted my teeth because I believe so passionately it has to exist in the world,” says McMaster.

It’s not been an easy journey. A previous two-year negotiation on a different London site fell through, and this one was originally slated to open months ago. It is a reinvention of a project McMaster opened in Brighton in 2014, which closed this summer after a tempestuous time: “I’ve had to dumb down what I do. Brighton does not have the contemporary food culture that’s needed for Silo,” McMaster told BigHospitality in 2017, prompting a furious response from locals. He’s more sure about London.

“I’ve travelled the world and lived in Melbourne and all these places, but London always felt like home. It was an easy decision for me to make to move here to this incredible brewery and incredible location,” the Sheffield-born chef says now.

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“When starting Silo six years ago, there was so much to learn. Now we know what we’re doing because we’ve spent so many years figuring it out. This is an evolution of what we did in Brighton – it’s just all the good ideas now, not the bad ideas.

“My great passion is showing the world that this kind of holistic, ethical, sustainable [concept] does not need compromise. I’m absolutely certain of it.”

There’s clearly an appetite for it, with crowd-funding raising £500,000 in support. “I feel so much more pressure now... I don’t want to let all these incredible people down,” he says, “Hopefully people here will get it, and believe in it, and we can do quite well.”

'I’ve figured out a way to make it work and I’ve gritted my teeth because I believe so passionately it has to exist in the world'

Doug McMaster on Silo

A tightly-controlled schedule which will mean every fresh ingredient is picked or gathered in the UK each morning by one of the chef’s 10 perishable ingredient suppliers, then cooked over a giant hearth in the centre of the kitchen around which “the whole restaurant has been designed.”

“Guests are going to be eating something picked six or eight hours ago, so the food is living,” he says, “Anyone knows anything cooked over fire tastes hedonistic, tastes better.”

The new a la carte dinner menu from McMaster and his team of 10 – five are staff from the original restaurant – will be seasonable and small, offering just 10 to 15 dishes. A £70 tasting menu will be an option, and diners can ask for a personalised version.

All will be 75 per cent plant-based, and McMaster says the meat offering will be “very carefully thought out”. Early dishes include grilled fantail squid, white kimchi and Douglas fir, smoked sand carrot with egg yolk fudge and egg yolk sauce, and Fresian dairy cow, buttermilk Carum and swede layers, topped up with Siloaf home-milled sourdough.

The new 50-seater space has kept the former factory’s large windows overlooking the river, with a right-angled counter bar made from recycled glass bottles serving drinks from McMaster’s longtime collaborator, the award-winning Ryan Chetiyawardana. “You could say he’s one of my business partners, but not really, because we’re best mates.”

McMaster is still the only chef to attempt a completely zero-waste restaurant in the UK, despite a general trend towards sustainable eating (“Blue Planet really was a game changer”). His passion started in his early twenties, after working in Michelin-starred kitchens including Noma and The Fat Duck, when he met the Dutch artist and environmentalist, Joost Bakker. Together they opened a pop-up restaurant in Melbourne and Sydney that aimed to send nothing to landfill, and McMaster grew from there.

He believes other chefs haven’t attempted something similar in part “because it’s so hard” to set up, and in part because “they’ve not had the amazing mentors who have inspired them to go for it, like I have.” Besides Bakker, he credits Fergus Henderson of St John and James Lowe of Lyle’s and Flor as influences.

Silo is set to be unlike anywhere else – and a one off. “If I was just to roll out Silos, what do I gain other than money? What I value in life is doing something good and making a difference and I can best do that with one.”

Silo will open November 8 at The White Building, Unit 7, Queens Yard, Hackney Wick, E9 5EN, silolondon.com

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