'And this is where we're going to put the wormery!" Arthur Potts Dawson is bounding around a room full of rubbish - or rather, not that full of rubbish. A bank of overstuffed recycling bins, a pile of crates to be reused and a sparse smattering of real, landfill rubbish are the only evidence of the 800 meals dished up by Acorn House Restaurant last week. Above us, on the bin-store roof, a few squares of turf mark the beginnings of a city garden; a place for the seasons to flourish in the grimly urban landscape of King's Cross.
"You'll be able to look out of the kitchen window and see it all changing," Potts Dawson (formerly head chef at the River Cafe) says, leaping a fence at one bound on to his freshly laid lawn. He has the spring of a child in a playground, rather than an executive chef who has just set up a restaurant the hard way - oh, and has a week-old new baby. Because Acorn House has not just been about picking fancy chairs and creating new dishes; it has been one great slog of uncovering the most eco-friendly way of doing things. This is a restaurant so green that even its fridges are doing their bit for the environment; the most sustainable restaurant in the capital.
"It just came naturally to me and Arthur," says James Grainger-Smith, the other half of the Acorn House partnership. "Restaurants create a lot of waste, you know, and this was a chance for us to really focus in on this. 'Let's touch everything we can with sustainability and eco - from the chemicals to these table-tops.' Everything that's not recycled is recyclable. Everything we touch we're trying to find a way to deal with it properly."
The idea might have been straightforward, but the execution is less so. Sourcing seasonal, sustainable produce is time consuming; hunting down eco-friendly paints, cutlery and staff uniforms demands dedication. It has been, Grainger-Smith admits, hard work - and expensive.
The scale of the Acorn House project - it is also a training restaurant with the aim of turning out new green chefs (both Potts Dawson and Grainger-Smith were involved in Jamie Oliver's Fifteen) - makes it something of a groundbreaker. But the principles of reducing food miles, eating seasonal local produce, and recycling as if your life depends upon it (because, actually, it might) have already started to catch hold in the industry.
Just round the corner from Acorn House sits Konstam at the Prince Albert, which opened earlier this year to great fistfuls of publicity due to chef Oliver Rowe's decision to source all his produce within the M25. Organic? So what? It's eco-friendly that seems to be the current restaurant buzz word.
I mention this to Potts Dawson; that this swell of public opinion must have been useful when it came to opening Acorn House. He gets a bit cross: "I think we have to be really clear here - we haven't done this to be cool, we haven't done this to have a good press kit or have a unique selling point. We've done this because we want to open a training restaurant for young people to learn how to cook. And Jamie and I believe that these people have to learn the next step of cooking, which is understanding a product and where it's going after you've finished with it. Whether it's cool or not I don't care. We're doing it because it's important for the environment."
Of course, an industry that is so married to the environment (no crops equals no dinners) cannot afford to vaguely hope that everything will work out fine. But, equally, customers are no longer prepared to hand over their money for food with dubious origins; those air-freighted Kenyan beans are no more acceptable on a swanky restaurant plate than steaming away on the hob at home. Keeping up with your customers makes smart business sense, even if it that is not your primary purpose.
Certainly, Barny Haughton hopes so. A West Country champion of seasonal, local organic produce, the chef has recently opened his latest venture: a large deli/bistro/cookery school on the Bristol harbourfront. Everything has been done with the greenest of principles - Haughton even employs a full-time sustainable development manager, Amy Robinson, to keep things on the least wasteful track. "We've got Amy because it's such hard work," he says. "It's full of complications and really big challenges in areas that I hadn't even imagined, such as how we reduce the consumption of energy and water in the kitchen."
Haughton talks of exhausting days trying to negotiate with builders and tradespeople who had never worked with sustainability in mind before; of problems even with the simplest idea of a rack for customers to park up their bikes before parking their bottoms on his eco-friendly chairs.
Has it been worth it? "I have asked myself that," Haughton says. "And yes, it has been worth it. Because anyone who comes into contact with Bordeaux Quay, whether they're a customer popping in for a loaf of bread or a member of staff, realises that it is possible to do things differently."
But beyond the practical building complications (and there are many) is the whole point of setting up a restaurant, eco-friendly or not: the food.
In Quartier Vert, his much smaller restaurant in Bristol, Haughton developed a reputation for delicious, locally sourced seasonal food, with cookery schools run alongside the restaurant. Like Potts Dawson, he believes that it should be the food that speaks loudest, rather than the principles. And that restoring the link between the seasons and the kitchen is paramount.
"I would say we lost the idea of seasonality for a period of time," says Potts Dawson. "We used to be very thrifty, we did a lot of foraging, we knew what was edible, just like the Italians and the French and Spanish. Now we are so worried about our food resources that we've handled all the responsibilities over to supermarkets, who dictate to us the worldly market. I don't think the British public know what the seasons are."
Changing monthly menus at Acorn House - November's lip-smackingly tempting offerings include mutton and mackerel - should point people in the right direction. Certainly, they will not be aware of the guiding principle of the menu - garbage.
"The menu is based on waste, on rubbish, on how we can get rid of our rubbish," says Potts Dawson. His suppliers now deliver in boxes that they pick up and reuse, the mozzarella man has been told to ditch the polystyrene packaging, and Acorn House is looking at setting up a network with other London restaurants so that suppliers save miles and fuel by making only one delivery trip.
Which brings us back to that wormery - and the extraordinary amount of waste that those wriggly little blighters can munch through. There will not be much food waste lying around at Acorn House. Each worm can happily chomp down and digest about half its bodyweight daily - which, given that the worms will be feasting on the finest produce available, and producing compost to match, bodes extremely well for that urban garden ·
