ETHOS, Restaurant Review: Who said no meat meant no flavour!
A cosy, vegan-friendly buffet situated just off Oxford Street, conscience of reducing food waste and aware of the damages meat-eating culture has on the environment.
The idea of going to a vegetarian/vegan restaurant in the West End did not fill me with excitement at first. I could imagine the kind of place it was going to be; a tinder hotspot for west Londoners matched by their love for yoga, and desperately trying to out-vegan each other. To my surprise, the food was delicious, the atmosphere was great and I left feeling thoroughly well-fed.
I had pre-booked a table for seven o’clock, which I would strongly recommend as visitors were being turned away at the door in front of us on a Tuesday night. We were seated at the back at quite a cramped little table next to two other couples, one of which was definitely a first date – seeing as we could hear their entire conversation. The restaurant itself is relatively small and is divided into two main sections: one side displaying the food in large Moroccan style bowls and dishes, the other side is crammed full of people with the towering trunks of silver birch trees entwining themselves in amongst the array of tables.
We ordered two glasses of wine and then headed for food. Ethos is a self-service buffet style restaurant where you pay for your food based on the weight of your plate. It costs £2.70 per 100g of food during the evening sitting so you are looking at spending around £14-£16 for a good plate of food. As my guest and I are both meat-eaters we were a little sceptical about the food that was going to be on offer, having checked out the menu online beforehand and only really been excited by the aranchini.
However, the food lived up to expectations and tasted as good as it looked. There was a really strong emphasis on flavours in the food and this ranged from the Indian/veggie take on a scotch egg, Thai sweetcorn fritters and Japanese miso-glazed aubergine halves. There is a wide selection of dips including the veggie staple hummus and also a rich, purple beetroot and yoghurt dip which complemented the Mediterranean meets North African vats of couscous perfectly. My favourite part of the meal was the seitan ribs and to start with I genuinely though I was eating meat. I had no idea what seitan was, but anything covered in BBQ sauce is a win-win in my books, so I ladled some onto my plate. Seitan, I later discovered is a wheat protein and is one of the biggest meat substitutes non-meat eaters use, some even choosing not to use seitan, seeing as its texture and taste resembles meat so much. After second helpings of ribs and aranchini we investigated the deserts. These are priced individually and they are the sort of post work-out chocolate based snacks you find in most health shops, but the raw coconut and cacao heart and vegan chocolate mousse were tasty all the same.
The concept behind this restaurant comes from trying to reduce food waste. Paying by the weight of your plate isn’t a concept that’s unique to Ethos however, there are other vegetarian restaurants such as Tibits that have the same business model. And it’s smart because the better the food looks, the more people are going to pile onto their plates and the more they are going to spend. Founder of Ethos, Jessica Kruger made her diet plant-based almost eight years ago for ethical reasons and says that’s she wants to create somewhere that is ‘deliciously different’ and sustainable. On the website it stats that Ethos’s mission is to create a “kinder, healthier world in which eating meat-free is the norm and where by 2040, 40% of the European population calls themselves flexitarian.” A flexitarian being someone who is mainly a vegetarian but occasionally eats meat or fish. Food waste is an international problem and according to Recycle for London's Love Food Hate Waste campaign, throwing out fruit and veg costs the average Londoner £200 a year, that figure rises dramatically to £700 for families with children. This wasted food generates around 2.1 million tonnes of CO2 emissions, which is the equivalent of around one quarter of the emissions produced by cars on a busy road.
Having a self-service buffet where you have to pay for the weight of your food rather than pilling your plate at an all-you-can-eat-buffet makes you think about your food choices differently. Obviously, I was keen to try all the different dishes and dips, but I did not leave the restaurant feeling bloated and tired. This was probably down to a combination of things; the food was all very fresh and at the back of my mind I was conscience that we still had to pay the bill. Ethos is a lovely place to eat for both veggies and meat-eaters and I will definitely be going back.
Ethos is located at 48 Eastcastle Street W1W 8DX, parallel to Oxford Street. Opening times are 8am to 10pm, Monday to Sunday.