Guilt-free gastronomy

The pleasure of good eating is not something about which I have ever felt guilty. Temporally, between when the food-laden plate is brought and when it is carried away bereft of its goods there is little space for shame or guilt. Each dripping sliver of roast beef or cloying spoonful of chocolate pudding is so steeped in indulgence that not even the postprandial ache of gluttony can invite remorse. There simply isn't room.

However, you read now of one reformed. It has been brought to my attention that the restaurant trade is inordinately wasteful. As much as forty per cent of produce bought by an establishment is discarded, and a tremendous amount of fuel exhausted by ovens, stoves, and grills. The expenditure of this fuel and the expulsion of unused food to landfill weigh heavily upon the environment. Thankfully, those at Pickledgreen endeavour to help. Steven Brown and Melchior Colmant are, in a sense, your friendly neighbourhood greens.

Having acknowledged this cavalier wastefulness, Brown and Colmant vowed to "embed sustainability into their business". Assuming responsibility for the environment, they abhor the deep-fat fryer and have renounced gas, installing instead hobs which heat by way of energy-saving induction. They use an air-source heat pump and a rainwater harvester to provide, respectively, water used for heating and cooking, and that with which their toilets are flushed.

They "work closely with charitable bodies" Leep Recycling who deal in all recyclable materials and Core Recycling who make compost of food waste and thus perpetuate the food-production cycle: field to hob to plate to field. Organic, free-range, local and seasonal foods are an imperative, for both gastronomic and environmental benefits. If a tomato, olive and goat's cheese 'Mediterranean' tart is what you seek, you are likely to leave empty-handed.

For the budding home-spun environmentalist Brown and Colmant's advice is simple: get to know foods and their relative seasons, buy local and recycle whenever and as much as possible.

One might be forgiven for not expecting an establishment espousing such a stringent doctrine to be culinarily auspicious. To label Brown and Colmant simply as 'greens' is to demean them, since in this context it is not economically easy to balance business with ethics. A business is a business: it must make money. But nor would it be satisfactory for a fledgling company to rest solely on its green laurels, to the detriment of taste and conscience.

Here, Pickledgreen has succeeded. At first, I found my smoked haddock, new potato, green bean and poached egg salad to be too sharp, striking some powerful acerbic note as if the chef had made too heavy with the lemon, but that was before my yolk had been broken. Once the saffron-tinted oil had been freed to inundate my lunch, the melding of sharp lemon and fatty yolk was heavenly.

This is entirely in keeping with Pickledgreen's chief aim: to produce delicious food that just happens to be environmentally beneficial. Their desire is not to impress with morals but with morsels, and it is impossible to accuse them of failure.