You won’t see any bins at Silo, but you will spot many a curiosity. The vast piece of steel kit in the lobby is the kind of thing in which a Soprano might stash a couple of bodies. A display of glistening pastries, made from home-milled flour, raw sugar and butter cultured in-house, also features “yesterday’s bread”. This, and the huge recycler-composter – that metal behemoth – hint at Silo’s unusual mission.
This rugged building on the fringes of Brighton’s North Laine purports to be the UK’s first zero-waste restaurant. You can’t miss it: dramatic inside and out, all concrete and brick and metal, it’s a million miles from Brighton’s occasionally girlie, retro aesthetic. And, despite arse-challenging seating made from pulped wood waste, it’s packed: boisterous parties, earnest computer-starers, breastfeeding mothers. I already love the place, if only because it would give Nigel Farage a violent dose of the vapours.
Their waste-avoiding initiatives are exhaustive and startling. That steel machine processes 60k of compost overnight, to be distributed to their growers and other local restaurants (the aim is to cut out middlemen completely). They cultivate their own mushrooms – you’ll see them right there by the composter – in discarded coffee grounds. If you want a receipt, it’s emailed rather than printed, to save paper. They even electrolyse the water, so when you go to the loo, there’s no soap: instead, flashing red and blue lights whip everything into cleanliness with technology I signally fail to understand.
The menu is predictably short, the handful of dishes projected on to a white-painted brick wall. On strange, waxy plates the colour of pond scum – made from recycled plastic bags – comes bread. No ordinary bread, of course: they mill their own flour from ancient varieties of wheat. Sacks are dotted around, almost as decoration, and the mill has pride of place at the end of the (very) open kitchen. The flour is made into sourdough: dense, addictive, almost meaty – odd, because the amaretto or einkorn flours are frequently low-protein, with the incidental benefit of being extra-digestible. On top, we spread their own-churned butter (what else?): sweet, lactic, I could do with at least twice as much. I wouldn’t waste it, honest.
There’s a hefty, hand-knitted quality to a some of the dishes. Jerusalem artichokes, baked, then fried until their skins are almost caramelised, on a slick of ripe Sussex Yeoman cheese, could have been, well, more delicate. There are about six whole tubers on the plate – as a starter. If I’d eaten the lot, I could have probably hover-propelled myself home. There’s eco for you.
You might suspect it to be vegan, or at least vegetarian, but chef/owner Douglas McMaster’s stint at St John means he’s happy with meat, as long as the whole beast is pressed into service. He brings a dish to our table: local venison shot by “my pal Trevor”. It ain’t pretty, a hummock of slow-braised meat on top of lentils laced with parsnip in various guises – crisps (dehydrated, not fried, I’d guess), batons, fried dice. But whether it’s because it has languished in Westdene Butchers’ outhouse for months, or because of the addition of fermented ramsons (a sucker-punch of allium pungency), it has a thrilling, throat-tickling resonance, like a low note played on an old cello.
The “plant” option is a “potato steak”, spuds pressed and fried, topped with a granular, nutty romesco and laced with elephant garlic. Pudding, a stout steamed treacle sponge studded with cacao, has a pool of goat’s milk custard (lighter and sharper than cow’s) that’s sparkling in its creamy freshness. And there’s white wine, local pinot gris from Stopham Vineyard, which, though not about to trouble the output of Alsace, isn’t half bad.
Yes, it’s tempting to smirk, at some of the language especially: preserves made from “intercepted” mangoes, porridge from “activated grains”. They’ve just raised over 40 grand through crowdfunding, “to achieve a zero carbon delivery system, sourcing non-native products such as green coffee beans, red wine and cacao sailed in with only the wind as energy”. But it isn’t funny: waste from the food industry alone is estimated to cost £5bn a year. In fact, instead of snickering, I wish I’d spotted it in time to make a small investment. After all, we’re looking at the future.
• Silo 39 Upper Gardner Street, Brighton, 01273 674 259. Open all week, 9am-5pm (8.30pm Thurs-Sat; 11am-5pm Sun). About £22 a head plus drinks and service.
Food 6/10
Atmosphere 7/10
Value for money 8/10
Ethos 10/10
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• This article was amended on 14 March 2015 to correct the reference to Brighton’s North Laine
