 Image courtesy of Zero Carbon Food website. We take our weekend inspiration from the recently launched Growing Underground by Zero Carbon Food. In disused air raid settlers underneath the streets of Clapham in South London, micro-greens and salad leaves are being grown. The greens produced are all chemical and pesticide green, low on food miles and importantly flavoursome. This commercial farm aims to supply restaurants, cafes and Londoners with its urban underground harvest. The Zero Carbon Food team is looking for investors, so to find out more about this truly ingenious initiative, click here.
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London is full of great coffee shops but Workshop Coffee stands out from the crowd. We go behind the scenes and speak to its wholesale support manager, Stuart Ritson, to find out more about this pioneer roaster, its involvement with One Farmer, One Roaster, and the secret to a great coffee.
Workshop Coffee launched on to the London coffee scene in 2011 with a promise to source, roast and serve “the best coffee possible”. Three-years later, it has more than delivered on its promise, remaining synonymous with London’s third generation of coffee roasters responsible for the city’s now cafe culture. “At the time the coffee movement was well under way but still relatively new; there weren’t as many shops as there are now and not as much emphasis on quality. Roasters like Workshop made people think about the origins of coffee for the first time,” explains Stuart Ritson, its wholesale support manager. The showcase for the coffee was its Clerkenwell site, a converted textile factory. One of the first roaster cafes, Workshop introduced London to a new coffee experience, a place to learn about coffee — from its origins through to its roasting from enthusiastic, well-trained baristas. London was hooked. Several accolades followed including 'Best Independent Cafe' at the 2012 Cafe Society Awards and ‘Best Independent Cafe Europe’ in 2013, as well as two coffee bars: one in Marylebone and the other, more recently in Holborn. As for the coffee itself, Workshop has always been about “coffee first,” says Ritson, “really good fresh green coffee, tasty, sweet”. This has meant continued investing in sourcing, frequent travel to farmers and cooperatives (“in the last six months, we have been to Ethiopia twice, Columbia, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Guatemala”) and participating in projects like One Farmer, One Roaster.  London Food Essentials Soho food map by Livi Gosling. Pure razzle-dazzle, a place to see and be seen: in the heartland of tourist London you'll find a labyrinthine of streets that earns London its reputation as a global food city. We just love this new food map by Livi Gosling created exclusively for London Food Essentials. To discover our favourite places in Soho, click here for your free self-guided food walk.
 London is full of great coffee shops but Workshop Coffee stands out from the crowd. We go behind the scenes and speak to its wholesale support manager, Stuart Ritson, to find out more about this pioneer roaster, its involvement with One Farmer, One Roaster, and the secret to a great coffee.
Watch this space for our interview with Stuart due out by the end of April 2014. On this "no-excuses" Easter chocolate weekend, here are the best of the best of London's talented and more often than not quirky chocolatiers. Enjoy.
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February 2017
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