<img decoding="async" class="size-full-width wp-image-1573212" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/IMG_7337-e1756398166107.jpeg?quality=80&w=970" alt="" width="970" height="729" data-caption='Silo chef Douglas McMaster. <span class=”media-credit”>Courtesy @Hdg_photography</span>’>
At Silo, a stylish, light-filled restaurant in London’s Hackney Wick neighborhood, the meal begins and ends with bread. After a snack that opens the tasting menu, a slice of pillowy sourdough—baked in-house using wheat that Silo mills by hand—arrives, accompanied by butter that is also churned in the open kitchen. Several hours later, after multiple dishes have graced the table, the bread and butter are reimagined into the final dish: a buttermilk ice cream sandwich served with Marmite caramel. The dessert is made using waste from the bread and butter course—a clever way of closing the loop, which is the premise behind everything chef Douglas McMaster does at Silo.
“When you make sourdough, you never know how much you’re going to need,” McMaster tells Observer, speaking from his London restaurant in August. “Bread is the number one wasted food product in the Western world, so it’s always abundant. Turning it into a miso is very efficient because there’s no byproduct—it’s 100 percent bread waste. We mix that miso with a caramel.”
Previously, the restaurant made the ice cream from bread waste, but it left bread pulp in the infusion, and there was a lack of flavor. “It felt like an inefficient way to use waste bread,” McMaster says. “We switched it to making a bread miso. We use the buttermilk from making butter as the ice cream, and the bran from milling the flour is the wafer on the sides. It’s a sophisticated and elegant way to close the loop.”
The term “closing the loop” is used a lot at Silo, both on the menu and in descriptions of the restaurant’s ethos. McMaster initially opened Silo in Brighton in 2014, with the aim of being the world’s first no-waste restaurant. In 2019, he relocated Silo to London—it was the same year he published his first book, The Zero Waste Blueprint, which shared McMaster’s vision for a kitchen without a trash can. These days, McMaster helms Silo alongside executive chef William Stoyle. McMaster also runs Silo’s fermentation factory, guides no-waste Mexico City restaurant Baldío, and is writing his second book, There Is No Bin in the Jungle.
“I have so many projects,” he admits. “But Silo is the center of the universe.” A focus on sustainability is at the core of everything McMaster does, both on a microcosmic level and on a global scale. Being zero waste is a massive challenge, particularly in a city, where many products arrive in plastic or layers of packaging. The chef is quick to admit that no matter how good Silo is, it’s not yet truly sustainable. “No restaurant is,” he says. “I think Silo is remarkably close to it, but it’s not there yet.”
McMaster intentionally chose to bring Silo into an urban environment. He didn’t want to move out to the countryside and forget that one of the primary environmental problems is urban sustainability. “That’s where the problem is at its worst—in dense, urban environments,” the chef says. “Silo is there to solve a problem [and] to demonstrate how a food system can be zero waste and work by not harming nature.”
The concept of a closed-loop system is the same as being zero waste. McMaster explains it by describing a carrot. Typically, a restaurant would get the carrot from a farm, peel it and use only a big chunk of its center. “The skin will be wasted, the tail will be wasted, the tops are definitely wasted,” he says. “Very seldom do I see carrot tops used. So that loop has been broken. And then you’ve got to consider the energy in which that carrot has been delivered—the energy extraction, the materials, the packaging, the pollution.”
In order for the carrot to become a “closed-loop carrot,” as McMaster puts it, not only is everything used, but there is also mindfulness for its delivery. “The carrot tops have been turned into a pesto or a green smoothie, the skin has just been left on because it’s more nutritious and delicious, and the top and the tail have gone into tomorrow’s soup,” he explains. “And then, is it green, renewable energy powering the delivery of that carrot? Is there zero packaging? Generally, the idea is to close the loop on that whole product and maximize 99 to 100 percent of that whole product into a cycle of nature, whether that’s our digestive tract or an effective composting system.”
According to McMaster, many guests and critics have assumed that Silo only serves plant-based dishes. When the restaurant first opened, he received dozens of messages calling him a hypocrite for serving meat and fish. But the chef believes that animals are a key part of true sustainability. While he thinks the industrial farming system is “absolutely an abhorrent, ethical disgrace,” McMaster believes in a more recent version of regenerative agriculture.
“I don’t think anyone who understands agriculture will dispute or offer a rebuttal to this, but there is no more sustainable food system than the ones that are designed with animals,” he says. “For example, the rapeseed we use for the oil at Silo comes from a beautiful fifth-generation family farm. There is no way to prevent the fly beetle, which will devastate the entire crop. The only organic way to do that that we’re aware of is sheep. Animals are really pivotal to the agricultural side of the food system.”
He continues, “Those animals live and die, and in some cases, overpopulate and devastate an environment when it becomes out of hand, such as [with] invasive species. Death is inextricably part of nature and part of life, and to deny that seems a little bit delusional and a little bit short-sighted. But I will go vegan before we serve anything from an industrial food system, because that is, fundamentally, what is killing the environment.”
The current menu includes invasive Mediterranean octopus caught in Cornwall as one of the main dishes. It’s seared and served with a rich mole (created, of course, using kitchen waste). A year and a half ago, McMaster visited a village in Cornwall called Looe, where one of the local fishermen told him that most London chefs order the same fish over and over again, often ignoring more sustainable catches like grey mullet. The fisherman explained that due to warming seas, many octopus had been showing up in their waters, traveling north in search of a cooler climate.
“We were fascinated,” McMaster says. “There wasn’t enough last year to put on the menu, but in one year, the problem has gone from bad to worse. Now the problem is so bad that we’ve got plenty of octopus to go on the menu. If you got into a heated debate with a vegan, they would always say that it is a problem because of humans. And that is true, that invasive octopus is moving or migrating from the Mediterranean to the south coast of the U.K. because of global warming that we have facilitated. And it’s ultimately a human problem. But should we ignore that and let the problem grow, or do we do the right thing and eat the octopus and not waste that octopus?”
McMaster is clear that Silo isn’t intended to be overtly educational. It’s still an upscale restaurant that offers the same quality of experience as any other similar spot in London. The tasting menu, available as a shortened version for £45 or an “all-in” version for £75, showcases quality cooking alongside sustainable practices. With many dishes, you might not even realize ingredients are being reused unless you’re explicitly told. For example, a rich dumpling topped with radicchio is made with bread waste, but it tastes like an original inclusion rather than a redux.
“The best way to demonstrate sustainability isn’t by telling people what’s sustainable,” McMaster says. “It’s serving sustainability in a way that is delicious or brilliantly done. Essentially, that’s the goal: How do we make sustainability sexy? It’s never going to be the future if it’s not delicious or sexy, and people won’t respond well if you bat them around the head with a doctrine. You need to lead with desire.”
McMaster wasn’t an expert in sustainability practices when he started Silo. Today, however, many fellow chefs look to him for inspiration and guidance. He founded The Zero Waste Cooking School, which features online videos that offer instruction about fermentation using koji, maximizing all parts of a particular vegetable and ditching common kitchen practices like wrapping everything in plastic wrap. The restaurant’s fermentation factory, Flux, offers an opportunity for McMaster to collaborate with other London chefs. For example, Santiago Lastra, from Kol and Fonda, plans to work with McMaster to make masa miso from his corn waste.
“He’s importing this incredible maize from Mexico from these indigenous communities that are farming in really responsible ways, but it’s coming all the way across the Atlantic, which is no small feat,” McMaster says. “To waste 10 to 20 percent of that maize is a shame, and Santiago knows that. So what if we can turn it into miso? That is a great way to honor the fine work of the beautiful indigenous communities in Mexico. That has not happened yet, but that’s what Flux is, and [what] we’re hoping we can achieve.”
At home, McMaster employs similar low- and no-waste practices. He has to have some level of open-mindedness because sometimes people send him gifted products in packaging. “At Silo, we are very serious because it goes beyond me—it’s the whole community of Silo,” he says. “At home, there’s a little bit of flexibility. But 98 percent of what Silo does is the same at home. I have the same principle of working with amazing regenerative farmers. The ethical butcher that we use at Silo, I use at home.”
Throughout our conversation, McMaster talks about connecting with nature. He visits all of his suppliers, from the fishermen to the farmers, but he lives in London, which is a challenging place to find peaceful moments of respite. So every day, McMaster goes to the nearby Victoria Park and takes off his shoes and socks to stand barefoot on the grass. Sometimes, he visits Epping Forest, where there is ancient soil that grows an array of ferns, which emit a particular microbiome.
“Your sight is programmed to see nature, and when we just look at brick walls all day, that creates a very subtle frequency of stress because we’re not seeing what we have spent millions of years adapting to see,” he says. “By going into nature, by looking at a tree, by taking deep breaths, we can connect to nature. Part of our biological cycle is to breathe deeply, and we don’t because of patterns of urban dwelling and overconsumption of digital information. We are not breathing deeply because we’re so distracted by our phones.”
Although McMaster would like to see big changes, like mass adoption of zero-waste practices in kitchens, he’s aware that things take time. He applauds Michelin for adding a green star to their accolades (Silo received theirs in 2021, the year it was introduced in the U.K.), and he has a lot of grace for chefs who are just trying to survive in a tumultuous hospitality industry.
“I don’t want to come across as this arrogant, self-righteous person,” he says. “I’ve got no negative feelings directed at anyone else for not doing things sustainably because I understand how they’re just trying to survive. Honestly, I want to be really gentle with this subject because it’s hard out there and people are trying, and that’s what’s important.”
The chef knows there’s a lot more work to be done, both at Silo and on a larger level. He describes his new book, which he anticipates will be released in 2026, as “a philosophical guide to not destroying the planet.”
“It has a dark humor, with a macro/micro commentary on the global food system and our part in it,” he says. “Giving a very clear perspective, which is what the first book did through the lens of Silo. This is through the lens of everyone in the world. I really leaned into making this book outrageously fun, satirical, creative, allegorical—it’s really fun and eccentric. That isn’t to suggest that it’s all silly. It’s also very serious. Nature, ultimately, is what you find when you turn to zero waste, and that’s what the book is about.”
A meal at Silo and a conversation with its founder may not be enough to completely change your approach to dining out or to cooking at home. But both offer evidence that maintaining a zero-waste approach is possible. And at the very least, hopefully McMaster inspires people to stand barefoot in the grass and reconnect to the world around them.
Want more insights? Join Working Title - our career elevating newsletter and get the future of work delivered weekly.
