Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: The Walled Gardens Underground Restaurant
The Walled Gardens Underground Restaurant is a very special culinary experience in Manchester, created by owner and award-winning Head Chef Eddie Shepherd. This incredible one-man operation serves just eight people per night, dishing up a tasting menu that showcases truly innovative and modern plant-based fare (and earning a superb three stars in the Food Made Good Standard while he’s at it!). We managed to grab some time with Eddie himself to talk about sustainability at The Walled Gardens and how he bears the concept of ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ in mind from menu design through to execution.
“Sustainability should matter to any business,” says Eddie Shepherd, owner, founder, Head Chef and sole employee of the one-of-a-kind Walled Gardens Underground Restaurant. “With mine based around a plant-based tasting menu, ethics and environmental principles are at the heart of what I do – so it’s even more important that my business matches this in terms of sustainability.”
This, of course, can be challenging. “With a business built on tasting menus, quality and deliciousness are the most important considerations, so being able to focus and deliver on those while still making sure that things are sustainable is difficult at times.” Always keeping “deliciousness” as his north star, Eddie’s priority is to work with top-quality sustainable ingredients, finding creative ways to repurpose any byproducts and keep waste to a minimum.
Reduce and reuse: honouring ingredients at Walled Gardens
As a one-man operation, Eddie acknowledges that it’s not currently possible for Walled Gardens to get to zero waste. “That said, I find businesses that are working towards zero waste very motivating. It’s important for me to take as much inspiration as possible from the creativity of businesses like Silo in how they avoid waste.”
Because Walled Gardens serves only one tasting menu, and always to a limited and pre-booked number of people, Eddie has an especially high level of control over his ordering process. “I can buy only the ingredients I’ll need for each service and prepare only the amount of food that I’ll use.” Beyond this, however, he’s always looking for ways that he can use leftovers and by-products elsewhere on the menu. “I love finding innovative ways to reduce and reuse,” says Eddie. “If I can find a way to turn a by-product or leftover into something interesting and delicious, that is really exciting to me from both the creativity and sustainability perspectives.”
“If I can find a way to turn a by-product or leftover into something interesting and delicious, that is really exciting to me from both the creativity and sustainability perspectives.”
For example, one course features a sorbet made from foraged spruce needles. “Once I’ve made the infusion for the sorbet, I don’t want to just throw away the leftover spruce, so I repurpose that to make small crisps moulded into the shape of a butterfly and use these to garnish the sorbet. This is a really fun thing to share with my guests and I hope it helps to communicate to them how valuable an ingredient the wild spruce is.” Inspiration doesn’t always strike straight away, but in these cases, he simply preserves the food in question. “Freezing or fermenting the ingredient can give me the time I need to think about how I can best use it.”
Food Made Good at Walled Gardens Underground Restaurant
Eddie discovered the Food Made Good Standard online, seeing it mentioned by other leading restaurants, and completed his first evaluation in 2022. “Going through the process was really helpful to for me,” he says, “because it gave me a sense of what I could improve, but also highlighted where I was already doing things well. I realised I should be shouting more about those things, encouraging my peers to think about the same issues.”
For businesses thinking about signing up, he says, you might be pleasantly surprised at what it reveals. “A review of your operations like this can throw up information you don’t expect, and offers reasons to feel really positive about decisions you’ve made as well as helping to pin down particular areas where you can do more work.”
“Going through the process was really helpful to for me because it gave me a sense of what I could improve, but also highlighted where I was already doing things well. I realised I should be shouting more about those things, encouraging my peers to think about the same issues.”
Shared values with Walled Gardens customers
Strong ethics and a respect for the environment lie at the core of Eddie’s work, and he believes these things are important to his customers, too. “These days, people are much more aware of the challenges facing both the environment and food businesses, so I want to make sure my business is sustainable – and I can share that as a positive message with my guests.”
Because he serves them all himself, communication with his guests is a fundamental part of the Walled Gardens operation and gives Eddie the chance to explain the real value of the dishes he creates. “I try to get across my love of wild, local, undervalued foods – things like nettles, dandelion and pine – as well as how I make the most of these ingredients.” He also makes good use of his YouTube channel, which has been growing steadily over the past two years. “This gives me a space to explain the processes I use in a more long-form, hopefully entertaining and illustrative way.”
Eddie is always looking for ways to keep improving. “While recycling is very important to me, its the reuse aspect that I’m most focused on right now. The garden and raised beds here play a bigger role in the menu every year, so I’m looking forward to developing those further. I’m also exploring how I can use any leftover foods that don’t have a place on the menu to nourish the plants that I’m growing, which will later become a part of the menu themselves.” We love to see any restaurant commit to getting better over time, and we look forward to seeing what’s still to come from Manchester’s inspirational Walled Gardens.
To see Eddie Shepherd’s stunning recipes and learn more about the techniques he uses to showcase the best of wild ingredients, head to his YouTube channel. You can also read more about The Walled Gardens Underground Restaurant here.
Read why ‘Reduce Your Footprint is one of the 10 focus areas of the Food Made Good Framework, or discover the Food Made Good Standard: the only global sustainability accreditation designed for the hospitality industry. Ready to get started on your sustainability journey? Sign up here!
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