Restaurants such as today’s always give me a sense of disquiet before I set off. Perhaps it’s their sense of gentle righteousness that puts me on the back foot. We all, roughly speaking, would love planet Earth not to die, choking in an oily fire slick littered with drowned polar bears, but how many of us actually do anything truly useful about it?
Then along comes a place like Chantelle Nicholson’s Apricity, staffed by mellow, thoughtful, industrious types who genuinely care about how the restaurant scene affects our planet. Suddenly, terms such as hyperseasonal, foraged, zero waste and low intervention enter the ether, which are all lovely concepts, obviously, and then I’m nine courses in and having the arse end of a reclaimed turnip-top fricassee explained to me, blinking in submission as the server explains how the chef rose at dawn to drain sap from trees. And, yes, the fricassee does taste a bit fizzy, doesn’t it? It’s at this point that I think guiltily about the punnet of Moroccan blueberries I ate that morning before hurling the plastic carton in the recycling, like some sort of planet-hating sociopath.
