The market garden at Wilson's

The long read: What even is a sustainable restaurant now?

18 Aug 2025

Journalist

Experts weigh in on how to cut through the noise and make sustainable choices when dining out

Have you ever been caught looking through the bins out the back of a restaurant, trying to ascertain what they are and aren’t throwing away so you can judge said restaurant’s sustainability credentials? No, me neither, but it is, according to those in the know, a great way to suss out whether a restaurant really is as green as it says it is.

“It’s a metric you can measure,” says chef Douglas McMaster, of London’s zero-waste restaurant, Silo, which famously doesn’t have a bin. “It's certainly not holistic… However, I would say, and I really believe this, that the less waste a system, i.e. a restaurant or a group of restaurants, has, there's a very, very strong chance there's quite a lot of good being done for the environment.”

Of course, McMaster isn’t really suggesting you go and raid the bins inbetween mains and dessert, he’s illustrating a point. But with any restaurant worth its salt describing itself as sustainable, local, seasonal, etc. now, it’s hugely difficult for diners to cut through the noise and feel confident that they’re choosing a sustainable restaurant when eating out.

According to McMaster, there are a few fundamental red flags all diners should be aware of.

“Look on their Instagram, their website… what are they presenting, are they talking about farmers?... Or are they boasting about how much caviar they use?... It doesn't take much to discern if somebody's authentic. I think you just read what they're writing and what they're championing, what they're proud of, what they're presenting to the world, and you can sniff out sort of superficial vanity projects immediately.”

Shouting ‘local’ but not providing any traceability information is always a bad sign. Also, look for restaurants that have a good integration of vegetables and grains in their menus and when it comes to meat, those that are using lesser cuts or utilising different cuts of the same animal throughout the menu, or even different parts of the same vegetable – carrot tops and cauliflower leaves for example (crispy cauliflower leaves are a great, food-waste-reducing snack to make at home by the way – just toss them in oil and then into the oven for five minutes to crisp up).

Juliane Caillouette Noble is the Managing Director of the Sustainable Restaurant Association (SRA), which produces the Food Made Good Standard, a peer-reviewed, holistic sustainability certification available to food and beverage businesses worldwide. The SRA also consults for 50 Best Restaurants, the National Restaurant Awards and the S.Pellegrino Young Chef Academy on their sustainability awards.

Similarly, Noble says a lot can be gleaned from the way restaurants tell the stories of their ingredients, even if storytelling in restaurants is becoming somewhat overwrought.

“I say this as a business called the Sustainable Restaurant Association, but just using the word sustainable over and over again… we’ve completely muddled in people's minds what it means. So I think specificity in your storytelling [is needed]… Diners connect to stories… and restaurants that are doing this well know that, and they're telling the stories of those ingredients, and that's kind of a dead giveaway that this is a restaurant that's done their due diligence on their supply chain.”

When it comes to casual restaurants or high street chains, certification is important says Noble, “because these are bigger supply chains, bigger volumes, bigger operations” and because “Restaurants that are claiming a lot of things around their sustainability and yet have no associations to any kind of organisations working in that space means that they're claiming it themselves.”

Apart from the SRA, however, there are few organisations providing certification in a restaurant context in the UK, and Noble points out that a lack of it is not always a red flag – but it pays to be diligent.

For smaller restaurants and fine dining in particular, says Noble, “I wouldn't necessarily expect the certification side of it, but you would expect that relationship down to a producer level. You would expect that on the website and social media, and then once you're in the restaurant, you would expect that the front of house would be able to tell you where those ingredients are coming from.”

"Just using the word sustainable over and over again… we’ve completely muddled in people's minds what it means"

But sustainability in the context of restaurants is not just about sourcing and supply chain, although it is “by far the most impactful piece of their sustainability,” says Noble. “Operational environmental impact” as she describes it, so things like energy, water and waste, is also vitally important, but with this not being diner facing, the guest often doesn’t have a great understanding of how restaurants operate in this sense. It is ultimately, she says, “less sexy”.

Then there is another aspect that is often ignored: social sustainability, including the human side of the business, like how a restaurant teaches and treats its staff, and how it interacts with the community around it. The latter, though, is something that the diner can impact.

“Support your community restaurants and get to know some of the restaurants that you are dining in. Building those community relationships is a two-way street,” says Noble.

For McMaster, sustainability is ultimately “a system that’s balanced” and that includes the economic sustainability of his restaurant.

“If we're losing money month on month, then that's out of balance and the business and all the good work we've done will die. It won't mean anything because it wasn't sustainable economically.

“The more you invest into staff working 40 hours, the more the business won't profit. And that's just – it's not always true, but it's mostly always true – a sacrifice that the business operator makes. Do you believe in all your money, produce wise, going to a regenerative farm? If so, it's going to be, in this current state, more expensive. And that's the decision that you make. And there's, unfortunately, no incentives from anyone to do that. But if you care about the soil and the environment, then you will invest in regen. And likewise, if you believe in human welfare, you won't work them for 80 hours a week. It's trying to find that harmony between the three sustainabilities [environmental, social and economic]… trying to find the sweet spot.”

Of course, communicating the less diner-facing sustainability work to customers is tricky; you could, says McMaster, “be cruel to staff, and staff could leave, and then you hire new staff, and the system can keep going on and sustaining itself.”

“These are things that are really hard to judge as a consumer, and that's why bodies like ours exist in a way to try to sort of demystify, or to take away that burden on a consumer of trying to make sense of all of these competing things at the same time when you're really just trying to dine out,” says Noble.

Michelin to the rescue?

In 2020, arguably the world’s most trusted restaurant guide came into the space with a certification of its own.

The Michelin green star is awarded, annually, to restaurants that, according to the Michelin Guide website (the Michelin Guide was approached for comment for this piece but did not respond), “hold themselves accountable for both their ethical and environmental standards, and work with sustainable producers and suppliers to avoid waste and reduce or even remove plastic and other non-recyclable materials from their supply chain.”

The award was first introduced in 2020 (Silo won one early on, in 2021). According to the website, the Michelin inspectors are looking at “the provenance of the ingredients; the use of seasonal produce; the restaurant’s environmental footprint; food waste systems; general waste disposal and recycling; resource management; and the communication between the team and the guests about the restaurant’s sustainable approach” when giving them out.

For Noble and the SRA, however, the process, as they understand it, is simply not rigorous enough, something they’ve been highly vocal about.

“We welcome anything that raises public awareness of sustainability, and also raises awareness to the industry and encourages investment in sustainable practices,” says Noble. “Our challenge with Michelin green is that there is no clear framework, and therefore, chefs don't know what they're being judged on. They don't know what sustainability means to Michelin, and there's some inconsistency in how Michelin is attributing that. There's quite a lot of discretion to the Michelin inspector, which tends to mean that it's what they can find out from a website. From their content, you tend to see an over preference of people who have kitchen gardens or spaces right there, because you can see that link.

“There's not a lot of due diligence to the actual practice… when it comes to something like sustainability, it’s really essential that somebody's actually checking the receipts,” she continues.

At Homestead Kitchen, a family-run restaurant on the North York Moors, with yes, a kitchen garden, they pride themselves on giving “business to local companies” and providing “meaningful work opportunities” for people living in local villages and towns, says co-owner Cecily Fearnley. Homestead won a Michelin green star in 2025.

“The green star was an amazing achievement, and definitely helped us. The more people come to us, the more we're able to invest in more sustainable things,” says Fearnley.

Storytelling is an important part of the experience at Homestead: the restaurant highlights its suppliers on its menus and through newsletters. “People want to know where their meat came from. They want to know where their cheeses are from… it's so nice to be able to tell them the name of the person that has provided that ingredient,” she says.

As for how they were assessed, Fearnley says the inspectors visit “a couple of times a year” anonymously and that the restaurant submits updates to them annually on what they’re doing sustainability-wise or sign posts them to the information, which is often already available on their website and socials. The Michelin Guide has also spent time at the restaurant for filming.

“My feeling, my instinct, is that okay, yeah, they’re not following a step by step audit kind of accreditation, but they've come to know these restaurants and owners so well over a number of years that they are able to make these judgments based on a kind of deep understanding of the way these businesses run,” she says.

At Wilson’s in Bristol, which has held a green star since 2022 and a Michelin star since 2025, the award of the former felt like recognition for all the work the team had put in at their own two-acre market garden, opened in 2019, which supplies the restaurant. Plus, it resonated with their customers, says the restaurant’s co-founder, Mary Wilson.

“I think for Bristol in particular, it was really relevant. In Bristol, ethical consumption is a really huge conversation that people have all the time. And we were by no means the first people to be growing our own, or indeed be in the guide and growing our own. In Bristol, there's such a community spirit, and the local Bristol community are really our bread and butter. So I think that was a win for all of our customers.”

While there is an argument to be made that the assessment process for Michelin green stars lacks real rigour, there is a counterpoint: that they are a step in the right direction and are helping people make more sustainable choices than if they didn’t exist, that they engage the diner in the sustainability conversation. Symbolic rather than scientific.

“When it comes to the Michelin awards and Guide, a lot of people use that as an indicator of where they're going to eat and how they're going to eat… even just as an indicator of ethical eating, I think that the green star does a really great job,” says Wilson.

Wilson says Michelin rang the restaurant and had an “extensive conversation” with her partner, chef Jan Ostle, before the green star was awarded, including “a lot of in-depth questions about our sustainability practices.” She thinks too much responsibility is put on consumers to make the right choices. “I think it's the responsibility of the awarding bodies and the organisations and restaurants to be 100% transparent.”

McMaster is pragmatic.

“The more different organisations, big organisations, adopt the subject, the better. It’s early … culture, changing, shifting in a good direction, will like anything, iterate, and with iteration comes more sophistication, and there needs to be a lot more sophistication in how sustainability is measured. I would like to be part of some kind of project that did that,” he says.

Letting go

It must be difficult for a chef like McMaster to choose where to eat out, given he’s pinned his life’s work on the concept of zero waste.

“I absolutely can switch that off, thank God,” he says. “You've got to let go. You've got to compartmentalise the knowledge you have for the suffering environment… know it's there, respect it deeply, but you can't just live in a cave.”

McMaster knows that restaurants are part of the industrial food system, the system he says, is “fucking the planet”, but loves “all these restaurants, and I'm not going to refuse them because [they’re] part of a bad system.” He says chefs and restaurants shouldn’t feel guilty for not being sustainable, “because we're unfortunately born into a system that is fundamentally not going to be sustainable.”

What’s needed, he says, is more education.

“Teach kids about nature… make them grow food and then they'll have a very different relationship to nature and the system will just change itself.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Fearnley.

“Sustainability is making sure the next generation grows up knowing how to grow their own food and how to cook well and look after themselves.”

How to choose a sustainable restaurant: quick tips

– Choose restaurants that talk about their suppliers and provenance, that highlight and celebrate their suppliers online and during the meal itself.

– Study a restaurant’s menu. Are there a good amount of vegetables and grains on there? Are they using lesser-known cuts of meat and using different cuts from the same animal across the menu? Are they doing the same with vegetables, repurposing trims that might otherwise go to waste?

– Brush up on seasonality so you know which products are in season and when. Tomatoes on a menu in the UK in March? Asparagus in November? They won’t be local products.

– Do they have any certifications or have they been officially recognised for their sustainability efforts? In essence, do you only have their word to rely on as to whether they’re a sustainable restaurant? If so, it may be best to avoid.

– How do the staff seem to you? If there’s a general air of discontent this could be a sign of a toxic workplace. Look for restaurants that celebrate their staff online.

– How involved is the restaurant with the local community? Does it work with other local businesses? Perhaps it stocks their products? Choose restaurants that celebrate the community in which they are located.

18 Aug 2025