I have always liked angry food: Ugly Butterfly reviewed

Ugly Butterfly is a zero-waste restaurant and champagne bar on the King’s Road, Chelsea. The ‘champagne bar’ addition is so awful as to be pantomime villainous — I think of zero-waste diamonds and zero-waste wars — but perhaps they need this kind of duplicity to seduce the punters, who move so slowly towards wisdom? ‘Zero-waste’ isn’t an advertising catchphrase designed for Chelsea and its constituent tractors and immaculate blondes, unless they are very drunk. It is from Adam Handling, who has six venues, including the Frog in Hoxton and the sustainable deli Bean & Wheat in Old Street.

Ugly Butterfly is pretty, because anything ugly in Chelsea would shrivel through lack of identification. There are white brick walls with cradled wine bottles crawling up them like babies; pale wooden floors; rugs from old coffee sacks; single flowers in glasses; cushions decorated with butterflies; paintings of bombs decorated with flowers; and spindly old–fashioned café furniture, which is called ‘up-cycled’. I do not know why people do not say ‘second-hand furniture’ any more. Perhaps there is no virtue to buying second-hand furniture, and if you are not buying something new, there must be an apology crow-barred on to that decision, with spin. It is performative dining, as at the ludicrous Spring at Somerset House, which has an entire ‘surplus produce’ menu called Scratch. (Pre-theatre only; the hour of the dead.)

Handling says he wanted to ‘prove zero-waste food can be beautiful’ and the menu opens with a small manifesto called: Why Waste Waste? ‘This menu,’ it says, ‘is built on the foundations of showcasing food waste, utilising the by-products and leftovers of Adam Handling Chelsea Restaurant on Sloane Street.’

So, for readers new to sustainability, it is not food from bins. Handling is right: it is beautiful.