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’.
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