Step into the dining room at Spring and it’s hard not to be struck by the grandeur of the place. Light pours in through towering windows at the back of the room, flicking off the marble-clad bar, pale blue grasscloth walls and snowy white tablecloths. Clusters of frosted globes hang four metres overhead in chandelier formation, like grapes on the vine. Swap some of the tables for couches and this could be a Roman villa. Funny to think the room was once a tax office – it couldn’t be further from the gloom of Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue now.
Just as impressive as the dining room is the ambition in the kitchen behind it. Not content with serving beautiful food in a beautiful setting, Spring patron and founder Skye Gyngell is determined that the restaurant will do that whilst simultaneously eradicating food waste and single-use plastics from the kitchen. It’s no mean feat, but with twenty-nine-year-old protégé Rose Ashby at the helm, Spring is making great strides towards both.
‘Eliminating single-use plastics was a big challenge for us last year,’ says Rose. ‘We worked out we could’ve gone all the way to Scotland with the amount of cling film we’ve used since we opened, so one day I bought a whole load of lids for all the gastros and we just went cold turkey.’
Desperate times call for desperate measures, as they say, but the strategy worked – Spring is now free of single-use plastics, a considerable step on the road to totally waste-free working. The restaurant is also setting an example for others to follow when it comes to food waste too – Spring’s ‘scratch menu’ is a three-course set menu made entirely of food that would otherwise be thrown away, from knobbly fruit and vegetable peelings to stale bread. Developing tasty food on the fly with leftovers requires a certain degree of expertise and ingenuity in the kitchen, and in Rose, Spring has exactly the right chef for the job.