London's original social enterprise café is currently celebrating its twelfth year – a milestone for any restaurant, let alone one that's not-for-profit. Its aim is to help homeless people and ex-offenders get into work by partnering with hospitality businesses around London to teach its trainees everything from cooking to front-of-house management. Since opening in 2004, it's helped over 250 trainees, taking on 50 a year, and it's become a model for many other charity-focused restaurants. It has a menu of daily specials, fresh sandwiches and healthy salads built from seasonal, local and ethically sourced produce.
When it's not creating delicious seasonal salads and some of the best brownies we've eaten (it's all about the pistachio crumb), Clapham's favourite neighbourhood café-cum-catering company works with Key4Life, a charity helping young offenders to get back into work after release from prison through an innovative rehabilitation programme. Graduates of the scheme can join the café full-time, if a position is available, or undertake a three-day taster session. There's a personal link here, too: Social Pantry's owner and founder Alex Head heard about the scheme through a friend, and now personally mentors Suhail, an ex-offender who's gone on to work at Gaucho.
Fried chicken has somewhat of a bad rep when it comes to ethics, but that's slowly changing, and in no small part to restaurants like Chicken Town in North London, which uses higher welfare chickens and rapeseed oil to make things a little bit healthier. And it's not all about the chickens either: Chicken Town is a social enterprise that's committed to improving things for young people in its local area, giving its staff training that prepares them for high-level cooking and equips them for future challenges, as well as trying to combat child obesity.
A restaurant where you eat your entire meal in pitch-black darkness? It may sound like a trend-driven concept, but there's much more to Clerkenwell's Dans le Noir? than that. The idea is to turn the tables and to create an environment where those with sight are guided by blind people, rather than the other way round. The restaurant – which also has a site in France – donates ten percent of its profits to charity, but its underlying message is more crucial: it aims to prove that conventional businesses could and should employ disabled staff.
Brigade gets its name from its location in a former Fire Station on Tooley Street, and it's a unique social enterprise hub that was born out of a collaboration between PwC, De Vere Venues, Beyond Food and Big Issue invest. It has a simple ambition: to help people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness to gain meaningful employment, which it does by running a series of training programmes which culminate in six-month apprenticeships in The Brigade Kitchen, followed by seven months in another professional kitchen in London. It serves up breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as putting together private dining menus for groups of up to 22 people.
