Relocated from Brighton in 2019, this stylish Hackney restaurant from chef Doug McMaster wears its eco credentials on its sleeve: everything is sustainable, with many of the dishes made from ingredients otherwise destined for the bin.
First up: no preachyness here. The warm, welcoming staff give you just the right amount of background. If you sit up at the counter, as we did, you can even chat to the friendly, unflappable kitchen team. It’s fun. Otherwise, there are well-spaced tables, in a modish dining room. The ceilings are enormously high. The floor is made from natural cork, the elegant seats from biodegradable wool, the lights from crushed wine bottles. That may sound shabby chic. It’s not. It’s chic chic. With a touch of industrial edge (the building was once a sweet factory), the exposed girders and warehouse windows offset by ebony-stained tables made from sustainable English ash. Oh, and did I mention that the menu is projected on to a massive whitewashed wall?
With a no-choice tasting menu, their dark, dense sourdough perfectly sums up Silo’s ethos and commitment to quality. The grain is sourced locally, the flour milled on site, and when it’s cut, every crumb is collected and put into the house tamari (an intense, soy-like fermented sauce). Each crusty-edged, chewy-centred slice seemed to lead inexorably to another. It should surely be illegal.
The main changes often, but other dishes when we visited were impossibly pretty. I loved them all equally, but a few are etched on my memory. Like skinned red artichokes, their nude, faintly pink and firm, waxy bodies sitting in a pool of brown butter and that sourdough tamari. Or rich, deeply flavoured pieces of braised dairy cow – six-year-old bulls that farmers cast aside – with parsnips two ways (cubed and puréed, both excellent) and a peppercorn sauce. Or a dazzling pumpkin tart, made from the discarded skins of an earlier course and topped with rhubarb snow.
Go on, tell us more about their zero waste philosophy
Silo doesn’t have a bin, no really. Furniture is upcycled. There’s a fermentatrium. They say: ‘We churn our own butter, roll our own oats and support a root to leaf ideology, meaning that if an animal dies or a vegetable is harvested for food we will maximise its entire potential, respectfully.’
Time Out tip
If you book a table between 6-7pm, you have the option of ordering the shorter version of the tasting menu. This comes in at a very reasonable £45. The full tasting menu is £75 a head.