Doug McMaster, the 29-year-old owner of Silo in Brighton, spends a lot of time thinking about oven cleaner. “My oven only takes one type of cleaning product,” he says, “and the only way to get that cleaning product is in a plastic container.”
This bothers him, because at Silo he has a rule that “at least 99% of what we buy will go into our customers’ bellies, into our compost machine’s belly, or will be re-used in some other way”.
Otherwise, Silo is doing pretty well on the sustainability front. One of the first things you see upon entering the restaurant, in Brighton’s buzzy North Laines, is the composter, which can process up to 60kg of food scraps overnight. However, Silo is so efficient, yielding as little as 3kg in waste a day, that he ends up sharing it with neighbouring food shops.
Another contraption McMaster is proud of is the £4,000 electric mill in the basement. Not only do they make sourdough bread in-house, they also grind their own flour. And instead of buying in butter, which comes packaged, McMaster and his team get cream from a local dairy in metal pails and churn it themselves. “I don’t think there’s any restaurant owner in the world as committed as I am to reducing waste by 99.9999%,” says McMaster.
None of this would amount to much if the dining experience wasn’t up to scratch. Luckily, the food on my visit, on a busy Saturday afternoon in August matches his ambition. Sussex tomatoes, lovage and fresh cheese is sweet and tangy; poached trout with peas, parsley and brown butter properly indulgent.
Before McMaster started obsessing over the environmental impact of his work, his focus was squarely on cooking. Starting out as a chef in his native Nottinghamshire, he graduated to St John in London and travelled widely in his early 20s. In Australia, he met an artist called Joost Bakker. Together they set up the original Silo in Melbourne as a one-year experiment in 2012. When it closed, McMaster returned to the UK to revive it on a grander scale.
Not every aspect of his approach has been met with approval. “You wouldn’t believe the criticism I get for using wines from Europe as opposed to Sussex,” he says. “Sussex has such a proud claim on sparkling white wine, but do I want to use wine grown locally with pesticides and herbicides? No.”
You sense he relishes the controversy. “There’s something quite anarchic about not conforming with the status quo of sustainability: local, seasonal, organic. It’s a very linear way of thinking. I’m much more intuitive. People say, that’s so hypocritical. But where does coffee come from?”
Which reminds him. He recently put in an order for half a ton of beans from the Dominican Republic, to be delivered to Falmouth on a ship powered only by wind. It cost him £22 per kg instead of the usual £14 – but he doesn’t seem bothered. If it helps him reduce the impact of his restaurant even closer to zero, it’s got to be worth it.
39 Upper Gardner St, Brighton BN1 4AN
