In early October, the Michelin Guide surprised everyone by awarding a vegan restaurant in New York three stars. Daniel Humm, the Swedish chef at Eleven Madison Park, first awarded a Michelin star in 2011, was often praised for his duck and suckling pig. However, during the pandemic closure, Humm did a major pivot and introduced an entirely plant-based menu. This leap of faith was rewarded when the Guide announced that Eleven Madison Park, with its ‘bold vision of luxury dining’, would retain its three Michelin stars for the 11th year in a row, thus making it the world’s first three-star vegan restaurant.

When Humm talks about the responsibility of restaurants to use their platforms and privileges for change, he is echoing a shift being made by myriad fine dining chefs not only in New York, but also in London. There are ongoing and sometimes heated discussions about the circular economy being applied to food, which includes eliminating waste, foraging and using low-impact ingredients that are regeneratively produced from healthy soil and embracing biodiversity.

Sometimes, the shift to sustainable or conscious cooking can appear a little extreme; I remember Silo opening in Brighton in 2015 with the intention of becoming zero waste. Some thought it quirky – if not downright odd – when Douglas McMaster, the chef, talked about ‘not having a bin’, even though it is in fact a very sane response to the fact that we waste 9.5 million tonnes of food waste in the UK every year. McMaster has moved Silo from Brighton to London and his call to respect the way food is generated was clearly ahead of its time.

Many restaurants now lean towards a seasonal menu using local ingredients “where possible”, but more radical restaurants are doing far more to use their privilege for change. Chantelle Nicholson, the award-winning New Zealand-born chef who trained with Gordon Ramsay, opened Apricity in Mayfair in April this year. Her ethos is to serve great food, with a menu that includes meat and fish dishes but that has minimum impact on the planet. Restaurant critics have been surprised by not only the food (Grace Dent referred to it as ‘otherworldly’), but also the fact that Nicholson doesn’t proselytise: ‘You won’t get talked at if you come here for dinner! We don’t have all the answers. We’re on a journey and we’re always adapting to improve.’

We all know packaging is a nightmare – have you attempted to buy blueberries not encased in plastic? – but Nicholson tries to address this by having milk delivered in pails and meat and fish in returnable crates. She also allows suppliers to dictate the menu.

‘We take the excess that they can’t use, so we have a circular, rather than linear, relationship with supply and demand. They had a load of plums in early October, so we took them, dried them out and made our own prunes. We also use parts of the animal that other chefs might discard.’

This “nose to tail” ideology, as McMaster refers to it, doesn’t go far enough for some chefs. Alexis Gauthier, a classically trained French chef who once served 20kg of foie gras a week in his Soho restaurant, is now more famous for his faux gras recipe, made with beetroot, nuts and lentils. Why the conversion?

‘First of all, I was diagnosed with a fatty liver and had to rethink what I was eating and drinking,’ explains Gauthier. ‘Then I read a book by a French journalist and realised I couldn’t continue to profit from the abuse, torture, torment and death of animals. I became vegan in 2016 and Gauthier Soho became entirely plant-based last year.’

It was a revolutionary move. ‘And a dangerous one: I was a French chef in London with Michelin stars making a lot of money from cooking foie gras and fillet of beef. I had to ensure we could continue with a £150-per-head average spend without using any animal product. The change has allowed me to become a much more creative chef and to do something I truly believe in. The planet is super important to me and if we want to save it, the short cut is to stop eating animals.’

Some chefs make smaller changes – at Yotam Ottolenghi’s Rovi, heat energy from the kitchen is recycled, fruit and vegetables come from a biodynamic farm in Sussex and there’s a dynamic low-intervention wine list from small producers – but nevertheless it’s all part of the general shift towards conscious cooking. Some, like Skye Gyngell, have embraced ethical dining for years; her Somerset House-based Spring launched a sustainable Scratch Menu in 2016 to raise awareness around food waste and it’s now the first single-use plastic-free restaurant in London.

When Eleven Madison Square first turned vegan, it regularly had a waiting list exceeding 15,000 despite its Dining Room Tasting Menu costing $365 per person and its Bar Tasting Menu $195. It makes Gauthier Soho’s tasting menu of £95 per person with a sommelier wine pairing of £75 look like good value.

Ultimately, Gauthier would like to think other restaurants will see that his risk paid off and that gourmet vegan restaurants can run at a profit: ‘French gastronomic chefs are expected to cook with meat from day one, but you can find the same subtlety of flavour and texture in plant-based cooking. My faux gras is very decadent, very French – it encapsulates a new French gastronomy in which no animals are involved. Everyone should try it!’