Sarah Wasserman on the new winter menu at Mildreds, from 14 October
I’ve been cooking at Mildreds for over twenty years. When I started, “plant-based” wasn’t really a phrase anyone used. It was vegetarian food, and most people expected it to be a compromise. A nut roast, if you were lucky. Mildreds was one of the few places taking it seriously, and for a long time it felt like enough just to prove the food could be properly good.
That’s not true anymore. In the years since, I’ve watched plant-based food in this city go from a niche to something genuinely serious: restaurants built around vegetables winning the same recognition as anywhere else, and chefs giving a plate of vegetables the care they’d give a piece of fish. It’s been brilliant to watch, and a little strange too, because Mildreds was doing an early version of this before most of that world existed.
So this year we asked ourselves a simple question: if we were starting Mildreds today, knowing everything we now know, what would we cook? The answer is the menu that goes live at all five restaurants on 14 October.
A lot of you have told us, one way or another, that you wanted more variation: more reason to come back and order something different, rather than the same handful of dishes on repeat. Some of what you said is genuinely in this menu.
It took the whole kitchen team months. Dishes were built, taken apart and rebuilt, sometimes over a single ingredient. A good part of that time went into produce rather than ideas: talking to growers, trying different varieties of squash and beetroot, and working out which vegetables earned a place on the plate and which didn’t.
Some of it is new. A handmade sweet potato and beetroot tortelloni with hazelnut pistou and beetroot velouté. Glazed dumplings in chilli miso, with a cucumber and ginger pickle. An oyster mushroom and hispi shawarma that took us a few attempts to get the spicing right. Cauliflower tostadas with orange romesco and salsa macha. A pear and chicory waldorf with blackberry and pomegranate molasses.
Some of it isn’t new at all. Kiri hodi isn’t going anywhere (I know how many of you would tell me exactly what you thought if it did), but this winter it’s built around roast squash, with caramelised onion pilau, cabbage thoran and a tomato lime leaf sambal. Same dish at heart. More work gone into it.
We’ve spent real time on where everything comes from, food and drink both.
The pulses and lentils are British-grown, from Hodmedod’s in Suffolk, a small company that spent years proving Britain could grow its own. The olive oil comes through Belazu, from a family of fifth-generation growers in Catalonia that Belazu has worked with for almost thirty years. Seasonal vegetables, including this winter’s squash, come through Wild Harvest’s network of UK and European growers, and much of the wider pantry through Infinity Foods, a workers’ co-operative in Brighton that has been trading since 1971. The tofu is handmade in London from organic soya beans, and the sourdough ferments for 48 hours.
In the glass, the coffee is from Origin, roasted in small batches in Cornwall, and the teas are from Rare Tea Co., bought direct from small gardens.
None of it is there as a badge. It’s simply what’s in the kitchen this winter, and I think it shows.
Twenty years in, I don’t think I’ve enjoyed writing a menu more than this one. Thank you for being the kind of guests who tell us the truth, and for sticking with us long enough that it mattered. I hope you’ll come and try it.
Sarah