Anyone for crickets?

A BUG'S LIFE

If the Ento team have their way, in less than ten years we’ll all be eating insects. ‘Ultimately, we’d like to see them stocked in supermarkets,’ says Aran Dasan, 25, one of the insect-focused catering company’s four founders. ‘Insects are an incredibly efficient source of meat and lots of people advocate eating them, but you need people to actually want to eat insects for them to be a solution. As designers, we wanted to make eating insects beautiful, because we also eat with our minds and our eyes, so you’ll never actually see an insect in any of our food.’

Ento started life as a graduation project at the Royal College of Art. ‘We studied Innovation Design Engineering,’ says Dasan. ‘We all love food and wanted to come up with a creative response to the food security problem. We created recipes and a ten-year plan about how we’d convince people to eat insects. Almost straight away we started getting phone calls asking us to cater events.’ That was 18 months ago, and this summer they are being supported by the Grey Goose Iconoclasts of Taste project, which is helping them get insects out to the public, with a cocktails-and-canapés evening in June and a three-day pop-up in August, where they will serve a five-course insect meal.

Most of their ingredients come from a farm in the Netherlands: grasshoppers, crickets, wax- and buffalo-worms, which they turn into anything from wax-worm pancakes to a richly flavoured cricket pâté. At the end of the summer the team will start a Kickstarter site to raise funds for a studio and to develop insect packs for use at home. Expect Ento boxes to be on your high street by 2020. eat-ento.co.uk; greygoosetaste.com

CAVIAR, HOLD THE CAVIAR

Ivan Simeoli, chef at the Wallace Collection restaurant, thinks vegetarians get a rough ride: ‘It can be very hard for them to eat out,’ he says. ‘But I’m into cooking veggie food — it’s not boring.’ His verbena caviar is elegantly served with a topping of cucumber consommé and fromage frais. He garnishes the dish with rock samphire and sea arrowgrass, both greens that grow close to the sea, and so have a caviar-like salinity. Simeoli uses agar-agar, a natural gelling agent made from seaweed, to make perfect little pearls of verbena infusion. Part of the vegetarian three-course menu, £26, peytonandbyrne.co.uk/the-wallace-restaurant

IN-FLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT

The Mile High Dining pop-up has really taken off. A 1950s-style cabin crew whisks diners to places such as Beirut and Copenhagen without ever leaving town (events are held at secret West London locations). In late June you can eat your way to Sicily and, in September, to Mozambique. It will also be popping up at Kitchen Party, a summer-long series of meals on Northampton Road, EC1, for a seven-course journey from Rangoon to Kashmir on its own version of a Great Indian Peninsular Railway carriage. £65, dinemilehigh.com; shuttlecock-inc.com

ALCO-POPCORN

Head to the new Hutch Club at Quaglino’s to taste what must be a world first: alcoholic popcorn. Gourmet popcorn brand Joe & Seph’s has made a name for itself as a maker of super-luxe snacks — the caramel and Belgian chocolate one is killer — but now it’s figured out how to make it with gin and tonic. ‘My dad (and our head chef), Joseph, was playing around in our kitchens a couple of months ago and saw a bottle of gin that I got as a birthday present,’ says founder Adam Sopher. ‘An all-night popcorn-cooking session followed, which led to an early version of what we have today. We use London No 3 Dry Gin and tonic water so that when you eat the popcorn you get the crisp tonic flavours followed by the juniper and citrus notes from the gin.’ quaglinos-restaurant.co.uk/the-hutch-club

CHINESE WHISPERS

‘Northern Chinese food is very different to Cantonese and the sweet and vinegary Chinese dishes often served in the UK,’ says David Yeo, owner of Hutong, one of the new restaurants in the Shard, which he’s brought here from Hong Kong. ‘It’s robust, uses less rice and more wheat pasta and noodles, lamb, beef, river and estuary fish than southern Chinese food.’

It’s relatively unknown here, and Yeo is keen to show it off at Hutong, where there will be no MSG and dishes will be flavoured with spring onion-steeped oils or rice vinegars infused with raw garlic. Try kai-lan (Chinese broccoli) with ginger, lotus root with chilli, or abalone and daikon radish salad: fresh abalone (sea snail) slow-cooked for three days in spring onion oil. Hutong, The Shard, Level 33, 32 London Bridge Street, SE1; aquahutong.co.uk

MILKING IT

Next time you order your latte try asking for raw milk — coffee shops might soon see the benefits of milk that hasn’t been pasteurised or homogenised, such as lowering cholesterol. One pioneer in the field is Hook and Son, an East Sussex farm specialising in raw milk and butter. Its pastures are free of fertilisers and pesticides, yielding natural, pure milk — and the cows live three years longer than average. It’s not approved for sale in shops, but you can buy raw milk and butter from Borough, Chiswick and Stoke Newington food markets. hookandson.co.uk

ART YOU CAN EAT

Founded by 24-year-old food historian Tasha Marks (who is also supported by Grey Goose Iconoclasts of Taste), Animal Vegetable Mineral Curiosities puts on fine-art food events and creates edible installations. For a recent show Marks made a 16th-century-style vanitas, a glass-case display about life, death and decay — its chocolate skull centrepiece was eaten at the end of the show. Marks also sells edible prints with an eat-by date on them: they’ll hang for 18 months, but after that they’ll disintegrate. (See and buy them at the Camberwell Arts Festival later this month.) Eat more of her art at the Herrick Gallery, where she is using sugar infused with ambergris, a rare, scented substance produced by sperm whales and loved by both Casanova and Elizabeth I. avmcuriosities.com