Makerversity and Spring restaurant create a sustainable culinary and lifestyle celebration for Christmas!

By Charlotte Gilks

On Monday, December 23rd Spring restaurant at Somerset House will serve a special Christmas version of its anti-food waste menu Scratch, designed by Skye Gyngell. Skye is a chef who has pioneered many sustainable practices, including taking the restaurant plastic free. She launched Scratch 3 years ago, using food that would otherwise go to waste, also providing the opportunity for her team to invent a new sustainable and affordable 3 course dinner menu every day. Served between 5.30pm – 6.30pm, Scratch has been an incredible creative and commercial success.

The Spring Festive Scratch menu, served all-day from 10am until 7.30pm, will take place on a larger scale. Skye and the chefs will take this opportunity to make use of any remaining produce in the kitchens before the Christmas break. This one-off menu will offer guests two options for each course with vegetarian alternatives for starters and mains. Scratch dishes in the past have included pasta off-cuts reinvented into ‘Tortellini with girolles and sage’ ‘Shredded burrata, olives and outer leaves of lettuce’, ‘Slow cooked leek tops and Gorgonzola rind on polenta’ demonstrating root-to-stem use of the restaurant’s vegetables from biodynamic Hereford farm Vern Ferrow.

Sustainability is a topic very close to Spring and Makerversity’s hearts; we share the same philosophies and as such are delighted to collaborate together to produce a sustainable lifestyle pop-up shop in the beautiful Spring Salon. Makerversity and Spring are excited to showcase the following five Makerversity members whose work embodies this ethos :

The Shellworks creates sustainable plastic alternatives from food waste. Their aim is to bring these plastic alternatives to market, and so they have invented a series of scalable manufacturing processes tailored to the material. Unlike many bioplastics, their materials are compostable at home, as well as being anti-fungal and antibacterial. This makes them attractive to the packaging industry, which is where they think that will have the most impact. The Shellworks are collaborating with Spring in the lead up to the 23rd December to take the restaurant’s crustacea waste and convert it into beautiful bioplastic products.

The Shellworks – https://www.theshellworks.com/

Indigo Works is a small artisanal textile studio using soy milk and Japanese Indigo dye to make sustainable ecologically friendly products and accessories. All methods are free from toxic chemicals and pollutants. Indigo Works mission is to create sustainable ways of dyeing and printing using a mix of pre-industrial lost and forgotten textile techniques and updating them for the modern age. Currently 90% of the Soy we grow world-wide is utilized as cattle feed, soy can also be used as a binder for pigments to adhere to fabric – this is a widely underused technique and has the potential to change the way we colour textiles.

Indigo Works – http://indigo.works/

The Atlas Works is a collaboration between two London based designers and a traditional factory in the Atlas Mountains, Morocco. Their range is a collection of purposeful products that combine modern design, beautiful materials and artisanal manufacturing techniques. All the glassware is made from recycled glass which means the colour and surface markings are unique to each item.

The Atlas Works – https://the-atlas-works.com/

Ksoni is a body care brand on a mission to extend the eco-mindset from the kitchen to the bathroom through their range of natural products in plastic-free packaging. Come check out their range of shampoos, conditioners & body washes packaged in aluminium. And yes, that is shampoo in a can!