Cooking With Minimal Wastage: Inside Our Kitchen

Our head chef’s stated philosophy is producing flavourful food at minimal wastage. We have quoted her on it already, along with the obvious evidence — the crisps, crumbs and shallots that turn kitchen offcuts into garnishes.

This post starts where that one stopped. Garnishes are the easy tier. The interesting question is what a low-wastage kitchen does at the top of the process: which animals it buys, which cuts it is willing to sell, and how many jobs a single prepped component has to do before it earns its shelf space.

Everything below can be checked against our published menu and Li’l Habibi’s, which is the point — this is not a claim about our values, it is a description of what we already sell.

Buy the cuts nobody puts on a poster

The fastest way to waste an animal is to only want the middle of it. Down at Li’l Habibi, the kushiyaki section is built almost entirely out of the parts a prime-cut kitchen leaves behind: chicken hearts, Iberico pork jowl, beef chuck, chicken wings. Chuck is a working muscle. Jowl is a face. Hearts are offal, and they are the cheapest thing on that list by some distance.

Those are not humility dishes. Skewered over charcoal and cooked fast, they are better suited to fire than a tenderloin is, because they carry enough fat and connective tissue to survive real heat. The wastage argument and the flavour argument arrive at the same skewer.

Best example on either menu: Li’l Habibi’s babaganoush is finished with keropok chicken skin. Chicken skin is a by-product of every chicken dish in the building. Dried and fried, it becomes a cracker sitting on top of a smoked aubergine dip. That is a bin item that got promoted to a menu item.

One animal, two dishes, two rooms

We buy Margra lamb. It appears on the Hamilton Road menu twice, in two completely different states: as a rump under méchoui spice with ginger tzatziki, and raw as kibbeh nayyeh, the Levantine tartare, with shio kombu, wheat and a wasabi ponzu vinaigrette. Down the road, Li’l Habibi runs lamb ribs with smoked yoghurt and burnt paprika butter.

Three menu items, one supply line. A kitchen that only sold the rump would be buying a whole animal to use a fraction of it, or buying portioned rump from someone else and paying them to solve the problem.

The pork does the same trick, one stage further down. The Mangalica collar chop is served with a tonkotsu jus — tonkotsu means pork bone. The sauce on the pork is made from the pork. That is the oldest trick in professional cooking and it is still the single largest wastage saving available to anybody who cooks meat.

Sauces that work three shifts

Here is the part that is invisible unless you read both menus side by side. Almost nothing we prep is built for one dish.

Kinnogomadare, the golden sesame sauce, dresses the babaganoush and the Brussel sprouts — at both addresses.
Mentaiko XO turns up in the Cassava & Taramasalata at Hamilton Road and in the Mentaiko Taramasalata at Li’l Habibi.
Housemade labne is a mezze in its own right, and is also a component inside the cassava dish.
Taklia — the garlic-coriander paste — seasons the labne, and reappears on Li’l Habibi’s chargrilled mackerel kebabs.
Pork ragu is the body of the loaded nachos and also the topping on the mortadella skewer.
Konbu fries ride out with the steak frites, the şiş tawook and the mackerel kebabs — one fryer programme, three mains.

A component with one home is a component that gets thrown away when that dish does not sell. A component with four homes gets used up. This is why our prep fridge is a wall of labelled boxes rather than a graveyard of half-finished ideas, and it is also why the food tastes like it comes from one kitchen rather than two cuisines sharing a building — which is a subject we go into properly in what to order at a Japanese-Middle Eastern place.

Twice-cooking is a waste strategy wearing a texture costume

Read the menu for the phrase “twice-cooked” and it comes up repeatedly: twice-cooked cassava chippies, twice-cooked Fremantle octopus, and at Li’l Habibi, Iberico jowl that is twice cooked before it ever meets a skewer.

Diners read that as a promise about texture, and it is one. But the operational reason is different: the first cook happens in a batch, ahead of service, at a temperature the kitchen controls completely. Only the second cook happens to order. That means a dish can be finished in two minutes instead of forty, which means fewer items fired speculatively, which means less food cooked for tables that changed their mind.

It also means tough, cheap, collagen-heavy things become sellable. Octopus and pig cheek are only difficult if you have one pass at them.

Weigh things

There is a set of scales on the pass and it gets used. The ribeye is sold at 300g. The wagyu karubi is sold at 200g. Li’l Habibi’s steak frites is a 300g cut of the day.

Two things follow. First, portioning to a number rather than to an eye means the trim is predictable, and predictable trim can be planned into something else instead of being scraped off. Second — and this is the more honest one — “cut of the day” is a wastage tool with a nice name on it. It lets the kitchen sell whatever is at its best that day rather than committing in print to a cut it then has to source whatever the week looks like.

Why the omakase is the most efficient thing we sell

Hamilton Road runs FEEEEED ME!, a chef-selected series of dishes for a minimum of two. Li’l Habibi runs its own version, spelled FEED ME. Both menus also sell “GIMME ALL!!!” spreads rather than single dips.

When the guest chooses, the kitchen must be ready for every possible order all night. When the kitchen chooses, it cooks what is at its peak, in the quantities it actually has, and nothing sits waiting to be picked. That is why chef’s-choice menus exist in kitchens far stricter than ours, and it is why ours is the thing we push hardest at big tables.

The same logic explains a line at the bottom of Li’l Habibi’s menu that occasionally surprises people: “Substitutions may be politely declined.” A kitchen prepping this deep cannot rebuild a plate at the pass. Saying so is more respectful than agreeing and then doing it badly.

What we are not claiming

We are not claiming zero waste, and we are not putting a number on any of this, because we have not measured it in a way that would survive being quoted. Nobody can audit a kitchen from a blog post, including this one.

What we can point at is the menu, which is a public document, and which was designed by somebody who thinks throwing food away is a failure of imagination before it is a failure of ethics. The gallery shows more of the room it happens in.

If you want to taste the argument rather than read it, the chef’s-choice menu is the shortest route — book a table at 29 Hamilton Road, Tuesday to Sunday, and ask for FEEEEED ME!. It is also, not coincidentally, the version of dinner where we throw the least away.

Habibi-san