Can meat stay on the menu? Twickenham shows the way
Twickenham Stadium executive head chef Tom Rhodes is going the extra mile - including spending 18 months as a vegan - in making food at events as sustainable as possible. And yes, that includes meat.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an event menu featuring meat will be less sustainable than a plant-based menu. Right?
Well, 99 times out of 100, that’s probably true. But while the “plant-based good, meat-based bad” mantra generally holds firm, there are exceptions. Because if you do it right, you can give your delegates their meat and two veg and still maintain your zero carbon credentials.
Tom Rhodes, executive head chef at Twickenham, is the exception that proves the rule. Leading a team of 20 and serving more than 10,000 covers on a match day, he’s spent the last few years obsessing over creating zero carbon, eco-friendly menus – yes, with meat on them. Under his watch, the kitchen is also committed to reducing food miles and sourcing as many products as locally as possible.
Twickenham head chef Tom Rhodes
Twickenham head chef Tom Rhodes
I meet Rhodes at Twickenham during a match day service to get down into the details. He’s just come straight from a meeting with his lamb supplier, a Lake District farmer who’s now having a pitchside tour.
“We've taken a whole carcass of lamb for this game,” says Rhodes. “And we're saying, okay, this area is going to have a lamb rack, we've got legs of lamb that have been roasted off, we’ve got steaks that are going on the main courses in this area. And all the trim, any part that isn't used by those premium cuts, we’ve minced it down and I've made a shepherd's pie.”
On top of this, all the fat from the animal has been rendered down and used to cook the lamb, while the bones have been roasted off to create the sauce that's gone into the shepherd’s pie.
“That's the way that you can get away with serving lamb and being sustainable,” says Rhodes. “The historic thing is you want a big piece of meat on your plate. No. A big piece of meat means a lot of animals. We’ll give you a small piece of premium, really well-treated meat with a side dish from a less premium cut.”
Rhodes is a stickler for the details and a true enthusiast; his eyes light up as he regales me with tales about the regenerative farming program, soil test levels, water retention at the top of the fells in the Lake District… “This is six months of work for me,” he says. “That you'll eat in five minutes.”
It’s not just the meat that receives this treatment – it’s each and every element that goes into the kitchen. For the last six years Twickenham has operated a circular waste strategy, which aims to get the most out of every single ingredient – even the waste.
“Everything that we do is driven by sustainability and flavour,” says Rhodes. “A good example of this is the use of a celeriac, which we peel, bake in salt and serve as a plant-based dish.”
The peelings are ground down to create a vegetable salt for other dishes; the offcuts are used for a jus on a different part of the menu; and anything else left over is reused in stocks and soups.
“That means you could have four dishes using the same ingredient in four different ways,” adds Rhodes.
“Say you save 2g per cover of waste doing that. It sounds like nothing. Well, we've just done 12,000 covers of it. We've now just hit 2.5kg. On one element of a dish.
“We're always pushing ourselves to make things better. Today was a really good day – but how can it be better?”
Roast lamb
Roast lamb
Shepherd's pie
Shepherd's pie
Last year, I started the Trade Show Vegan series as a way to explore the plant-based movement in the sector. Rhodes, however, was way ahead of me, having turned fully vegan for 18 months in 2019 because he “wanted to know how it felt” to be plant-based for the whole customer journey. And what did he find? “A lot of truffle!” he jokes.
“It was always truffle on everything. Which was fine.” Since then, the vegan experience in the UK has improved beyond measure, he admits. “It's significantly different than it was four or five years ago,” he says. “Now you can walk in somewhere and they've got a whole other menu.”
Rhodes is fantastic company, holding forth on why there’s virtually no salmon you can buy that is worth eating, or the plethora of different ways you can cook a beetroot. All too soon it’s time to head back to the Player’s Lounge and discover whether all the effort is worth it – the proof of the shepherd’s pie is in the eating, as they almost say.
Unsurprisingly, it’s fantastic. Succulent medallions of super-tasty lamb, rich gravy, and meltingly tender shepherd’s pie on the side. It’s a real highlight of a wonderful Twickenham matchday experience.
Clearly, Rhodes was ahead of the game in spotting the plant-based trend emerging. Perhaps then, in another four or five years many more of us will be talking soil test levels and circular waste strategies, and enjoying sustainable, carbon zero meat at our events. I wouldn’t bet against it.
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