Mildreds New Menu: A Note From Sarah Wasserman
I've been cooking at Mildreds for over twenty years. When I started, "plant-based" wasn't a phrase most people used. It was vegetarian food, and plenty of guests expected it to be a compromise. A nut roast, if you were lucky. Mildreds took it seriously long before that was common, and for a long time, proving the food could be properly good felt like enough.
It isn't now. In the years since, I've watched cooking built around vegetables become a serious part of how London eats, with chefs giving a plate of vegetables the same care they'd give a piece of fish.
So this year we asked ourselves a simple question: if we were starting Mildreds today, knowing what we know now, what would we cook? This menu is the answer. It's the work of the whole kitchen team, not just me, and we tested, changed and tested again until we were happy to put our name to every dish.
If you've eaten with us over the past few years and told a server what you thought, or answered honestly when we asked, some of what you said is in this menu. A lot of you told us you wanted more variety: more reason to come back and order something different, rather than the same handful of dishes on repeat. That's what we've tried to build.
Dishes were built, taken apart and rebuilt, sometimes over a single ingredient. The sweet potato and beetroot tortelloni comes with hazelnut pistou and a beetroot velouté. The oyster mushroom and hispi shawarma took us several attempts to get the spicing right. There are glazed momo dumplings in a chilli miso glaze, an aubergine Milanese with tomato ragù and basil cream, and crispy sambal mushrooms with green chutney and lime leaf. Most of it leans on vegetables and technique.
We've spent as much time on where everything comes from as on what we do with it.
- Tofu: Clean Bean, made by hand in London from organic soya beans by Neil McLennan.
- Pulses and grains: Hodmedod's, a small Suffolk company that spent years proving Britain could grow its own, and sold the UK's first British-grown chickpeas.
- Bread: Seven Seeded in Watford, made from four ingredients and a 48-hour ferment.
- Olive oil: from the Pons family, fifth-generation growers in Catalonia, through Belazu.
- Coffee and tea: Origin, roasted in small batches in Cornwall, and Rare Tea Co., bought direct from small gardens rather than at auction.
It isn't dressed up as a sustainability pitch. It's where our food and drink are coming from now, 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 telling us the truth, and for sticking with us long enough that it mattered. I hope you'll come and try it.