![]() ![]() An earlier version listed the wrong London postcode in the headline. This article was edited on 17 January 2020. Dinner £50 a head six-course tasting menu only brunch from £7.50 a plate, both plus drinks and service. Open dinner, Tues-Sat, 6-10pm brunch, Sat & Sun, 11am-3pm. I’ve seen the future of sustainable fine dining: I think many of us may well decide to stay at home. There are chefs all over Britain, in rural pubs and tiny cafes, who are making a stiff effort to grow their own vegetables, source kindly, re-use and recycle, and who love the planet, but they’re doing so with a fraction of the fuss and po-facedness of Silo. A tiny suggestion of pumpkin ice-cream is, however, delicious. It’s a piece of meat extracted from between the ribs, and comes from a wing of the dairy industry that’s not usually consumed – enjoy the course. The small piece of braised Friesian bull is delivered with a soliloquy on its various life stages, its noble death, and the machine Doug owns that turns an unappetising cut into something edible. ![]() The small amount of flesh inside is sweet and fudgy, but the skin is bitter and tastes, unsurprisingly, of fire. They’ve been caramelised over fire before being plunged into coals to get that blackened exterior. Two charred artichokes – and by charred, I mean they resembled something you’d find in the remains of your house after a fire – sit in a Stichelton cheese sauce with a vividly red ruby kraut. Silo’s pumpkin ice-cream: ‘A delicious, if tiny suggestion of ice-cream.’ If you’re in the mood for this kind of thing, you’ll love the place. ![]() With every course, a server arrives, calls you “folks”, kneels down, proffers a tiny sliver of radish with a small fart of hemp cheese goo inside, before talking you through the lifespan of the radish and the seasonings and the puddle of glop in which it sits and all the minuscule stages of its cooking process, plus the flavour notes of which you need to be aware. I think the technical term for this kind of thing used to be “moonshine”. Then again, Silo is the perfect place to hold a client lunch or to take people you don’t want to talk to, so you can all coo over distracting ideas such as Empirical Spirits’ drinks at £7 a glass, which are sort-of-cocktails but served as wine and made with a liquid that’s not based on any known spirit. ![]() Silo suggests that, in the future, going out for dinner will be so little fun that eating corned beef in your bunker will be a lot more entertaining anyhow. It’s commonplace in the restaurant world right now to be very, very ashamed of food waste, carbon footprints and, for that matter, the ethics of experiencing luxury at all. Mind you, I don’t have a clue what she’d make of the very burnt artichokes and the non-intervention wines that do not taste remotely of wine, yet can still get you so drunk, they’d numb the grief after all your loved ones had been squashed by a killer asteroid. Almost everything else about the place, however, feels like a 1985 Tomorrow’s World segment on “How we’ll eat out in the future”, in which Judith Hann shows us Silo’s magnetic table made out of recycled plastic packaging with the cutlery hidden within, and its aerobic digester, which is capable of turning 60kg of organic waste into compost, overnight. Up at Silo, meanwhile, loud hip-hop, jazz and spoken-word poetry plays over doubtlessly ethically sourced speakers. Silo sits in a large, gorgeously lit loft with a large sit-up bar and about 10 tables, and is upstairs from Crate Brewery, where, for reference, you can get a decent pizza and a beer, and no one tells you anything at all. Silo’s charred artichokes: ‘The insides are fudgy, but the skin is bitter and tastes, unsurprisingly, of fire.’ ![]()
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