Sustainable Business of the Year

Sergio Cinotti Executive Chef Gem42 - Gem42, Newport, Wales

Gem42 is a three AA Rosette Italian restaurant at 42 Bridge Street, Newport, where sustainability is the working method of the kitchen rather than a marketing line. The restaurant's stated policy is zero waste, built on quality ingredients with nothing thrown away. Seasonal menus, tightly managed. The menu changes four times a year, once per season, with two new dishes rotating in every six weeks to catch ingredients with short growing windows, such as asparagus. Limiting the number of dishes is itself a waste-reduction measure. Whole-ingredient cooking.

Chef Sergio builds dishes that use the entire ingredient, whether nose to tail, root to fruit, or tail to fin. On our current tasting menu, Welsh Black Beef is served as fillet alongside braised leg and shoulder plus heart, kidney and spleen, and halibut trimmings become a farce rather than waste. Named suppliers and published distances. Ingredients are sourced locally and suppliers are listed on the website together with the distance from the restaurant. Every menu prints those miles beside the dishPreserving as a waste strategy. Peak-season produce is bought in bulk when it's abundant and cheap, then dried, fermented, pickled and preserved. Our late-summer aubergine is salt-cured and kept in olive oil so it can be served months after harvest. Pasta di Pane, from waste bread. Bread is one of Britain's most wasted foods, with around 900,000 tonnes thrown away each year according to WRAP.

Gem42's response was to invent a pasta made from stale bread, which is lower in carbohydrate and fat and higher in protein than standard pasta, and the recipe is still being developed to replace eggs with surplus fruit and vegetable juice. The bread is dried in the oven's residual heat after service, so the oven is never fired just for this; Chef Sergio calls the energy that would otherwise be spent "invisible waste." From waste to soap. Used cooking oil is filtered and infused with herbs from the greenhouse, then combined with ash from the restaurant's charcoal and caustic soda to make a natural soap used for washing the kitchen's uniforms and towels, with plans to sell it to the public.

Beyond the plate. Menus are printed on recycled paper and napkins are linen rather than paper. When the lab test kitchen and greenhouse were built, Gem42 worked with a salvage company for reclaimed tiles and wood, and put the money saved into more energy-efficient equipment. Water-saving signs are posted at every sink and wash area, motion-sensor lighting is fitted in the toilets, and the wine list features biodynamic, carbon-neutral and organic producers, which opens conversations with guests about the restaurant's philosophy. Glass and cardboard are recycled and packaging is returned to suppliers for reuse, and the restaurant operates a plastic-free policy. Published and accountable. All of this is set out publicly on the restaurant's sustainability page, so guests can read the commitments before they book and hold us to them: www.gem42.co.uk/sustainability

At this point, 80% of the restaurant's vegetables are grown on their plot and greenhouse. Absolutely out of this world!