Every week, we interview top chefs from around the UK, hearing about their cheap food hacks, views on the industry and more. This week, we speak to Doug McMaster, owner of the world’s first zero waste restaurant Silo and former winner of Britain’s best young chef award…
I wasn’t the best young chef in the UK… There are young chefs at Silo who are far superior in the kitchen than I was at any stage of my culinary career. Maybe I was the most daring, or the most creative chef back then at the time, but I was by no means the most talented chef.
Soon we’re going to be producing “zero-soy sauce”… made from 50% bread waste (given to us as bread discard from local bakeries) and 50% lupin, which is a regenerative grain. Using that to make our zero-soy sauce means we’ll be able to harness this astonishing British product that will save us from importing tens of thousands of litres of soy sauce from China. We’ll be saving on a huge carbon footprint, so the more we can make ourselves, the better.
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The best city in the world to eat is… Copenhagen. For me, “the Noma effect” has had this seismic ripple creating a wave of excellence in so many parts of the hospitality sector, from bakeries and coffee shops, to breweries and avant-garde restaurants. Excluding Tokyo, as its excellence is untouchable, also excluding London… New York deserves a mention, but since COVID, it seems to have lost its sparkle.
When attending a dinner party, you should bring something you’ve made yourself… Anyone can buy a £15 bottle of wine from a local deli and bring it along to dinner, but it’s so much more special when someone can make something and offer that as a gift instead. We’re living in an AI-generated robot world; there just aren’t enough things that are actually handmade by people any more.
From a zero-material-waste point of view, ordering tap water is great as it avoids single-use glass, but… the quality of London tap water is abominable. If you care about the quality of your ingredients, why would you not do the same with water?
One thing I’d never want to see in a restaurant again is… caviar. It’s the least creative of all the ingredients. Arguably, it’s the laziest ingredient of all. I would be infinitely more impressed by a chef who can turn a humble carrot into something extraordinary, than one who can put caviar on top of a dish. That’s the kind of creativity and artistic flair that deserves credit, not the ability to put caviar on something. It has this weird currency in hospitality where it has some kind of authority in restaurant spaces where it shouldn’t.
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Stop creating generic restaurant roundups, like the “best restaurant in London”… “The best” is an infinitely subjective measuring stick that makes no sense in such a colourful, diverse and heterogeneous restaurant industry. It’s a reductive and diminishing way of looking at our industry. When you go to a new city, it might be a useful tool to help you narrow down a search, but overall it’s not a helpful way of grading things. There are lots of interesting lists that could be written that would be genuinely useful and valuable, but they should be more specific, diverse and not just full of sensationalised jargon. You could, for example, have an interesting list of the restaurants where you can eat koji fermented foods, or a list of bars working with low-packaging suppliers. We should celebrate nuance and ingenuity in this world, rather than trying to categorise everything under one broad and unspecific umbrella.
Restaurateurs should stop buying from soulless supply chains… By that, I mean a supply chain where there is no connection to the people and planet that produce our food. Using those supply chains does a disservice to all the food systems and farmers who are working overtime to save the planet, and they encourage the sort of industrial agriculture that we’re trying to combat. Any supply chain that is disassociated from nature is one that we should avoid.
You asked who I think is the best chef in the UK is… but it’s a question that’s drenched in absurdity. What’s best in one person’s eyes is personal, subjective. Let’s not homogenise our industry with one opinion or one way of doing things. When we do, we unconsciously all start cooking the same, and that’s boring. We should be celebrating what makes us different, not valorising someone as “the best”. I could be persuaded to name someone who cooks the best seafood in Brighton, or someone making the best pasta in Hackney Wick…but to name “the best chef in the UK” is too reductive.
