At sixteen, a lanky Adam Handling walked into Scotland’s Gleneagles Hotel. Wearing his dad’s suit to an apprenticeship interview in their renowned fine-dining kitchen, Handling was really just trying to dodge his A Levels.
Fatefully, he got the gig and so began the stratospheric rise of the Scottish chef. In the years since, he has conquered London’s fine-dining scene, won several chef-of-the-year awards thanks to his playful creativity, and created a restaurant group that now spans London, Windsor, and Cornwall.
Above all else, Handling’s commitment to seasonal British produce and an inventive zero waste policy is what’s made his name synonymous with luxury sustainable dining in the UK. He’s particularly passionate about reducing food waste given that it is estimated to contribute up to 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Read on to learn more about Handling’s early obsession with zero-waste dining, how he made sustainable dining cool in the fine-dining world, and his hopes for the larger restaurant community.
The path to sustainable luxury dining
Post-Gleneagles and London, Handling donned a backpack and jetted off on a break.
He developed his full-throttle passion for zero-waste dining while on a trip in Asia. “The thing I liked about it was that if you don’t grow it on the islands, you don’t use it,” Handling says of his experiences in Japan and Thailand. “If it’s not in season, then it’s not on the menu, and if you get a product, you use it all.”
He was eager to adaopt that philosophy on his return to the UK. “You’re not supporting local farmers, and you’re not helping to appreciate all of the value of a product in this country,” Handling says. “It was something that really frustrated the crap out of me.”
MICHELIN-starred zero-waste restaurant Frog by Adam Handling opened in 2016 and set the wheels in motion for a meteoric rise in the London restaurant world. A huge flagship restaurant opposite The Savoy in London’s bright, buzzing, and highly competitive Theatre Land? Check. A moody basement bar that turns food scraps into high-end cocktails? Check. Convincing diners that revamped waste can warrant the price of a seven-course tasting menu? Absolutely.
Handling partly credits his embrace to playful plating. “It has to look super bloody sexy,” he says about styling Frog by Adam Handling’s dishes. “It’s the fact that you’re inspiring [diners]. If you’ve inspired them by taste, flavour, and look, they’ll get on board with the rest of this menu.”
The challenges of a sustainable empire
Credit: Ugly Butterfly by Adam Handling
Refusing cheaper international produce and not binning leftovers isn’t easy. Handling credits trial and error and teamwork for his restaurants’ success.
The team gets together at the start of every season to debate what to put on the menu. “Say someone wants lamb on the menu, we bring down the diagram [of the lamb] with all of our head chefs and ask ‘what do you want to use?’” Handling says. “If [every part of] the lamb has been crossed off, we have lamb on the menu. If one part is not crossed off, we ask ‘does anybody want to use this part?’ If people say no, lamb doesn’t go on the menu.”
Using every part is essential. A banana is blended, clarified, separated, and caramelised to become anything from banana bread to a cocktail base.
Every ingredient is tested to the limit, whether that means using Pink Lady apples to dye gin or trying to make a carbonated red cabbage cocktail without the smell of cabbage.
The only ingredients Handling’s restaurants ship in are chocolate and nuts that come on a boat from a Costa Rican farm to limit the impact of cargo flights.
The birth of Handling’s ultimate local produce luxury restaurant
Handling feels his career so far has served as the perfect lead up to Ugly Butterfly by Adam Handling by Adam Handling, which debuted in St. Ives in 2021. The restaurant is anything but ugly. The modern space sits on the dramatic Cornish cliffs with floor-to-ceiling windows that showcases panoramic views of Carbis Bay waves.
While Frog by Adam Handling champions British produce, everything at Ugly Butterfly by Adam Handling comes from within the borders of Cornwall.
The dairy is five minutes away from the restaurant, the meat comes from a farm across the street, and the vegetables grow at from a collection of farms all just a few minutes away.
The chef says Ugly Butterfly’s success is good publicity for keeping produce local and allowing “suppliers to showcase their stuff with us and their creativity.”
The future of zero-waste dining in the UK
Handling wants to “inspire, educate, and motivate change within the industry,” he says. His success is one big thumbs up for a new era of restaurants where sustainability is just as important as flavour.
Handling hopes his example shows the UK hospitality industry that low-waste dining is entirely possible with the right mentality. “We have phenomenal game [and] seas because we’re an island, and we have different climates” he says. “I want Britain to wake up and shake that little flag within the world stage and go, ‘we can cook incredibly well.’”
Learn more on Frog by Adam Handling
Learn more on Ugly Butterfly by Adam Handling
Heidi Lauth Beasley is a restaurant writer and debut novelist living in Tottenham, London. She wrote hundreds of dining guides and Dear Heidi: A Restaurant Advice Column as a Staff Writer for The Infatuation. She has also written for The Sunday Times Style. Her specialist subjects include restaurant accessibility, creative crumpet toppings, and cosy wine bars.
