Newcastle cafe launches delicious new menu made entirely from food waste; Magic Hat launches a 'dynamic' new menu -with tempting dishes starting at £4 -in its latest initiative to slash food waste.
Byline: By, Barbara Hodgson
A city centre cafe out to create wonders from surplus ingredients is winning even more fans with an imaginative new menu.
The Magic Hat Cafe, which opened in Newcastle's Higham Place in 2021, has launched a menu described as "dynamic" -alongside a new pay structure -in its ongoing fight to tackle food waste -and customers are loving it. Which is no real surprise given that dishes start at just £4 and there is a range of vegetarian, vegan, meat, fish and gluten-free options available.
The cafe, said to be the region's first coffee shop and kitchen using surplus ingredients, was initially established in 2015 by Duncan Fairbrother and Jess Miller who had worked in the food industry and were shocked by what was being thrown out by shops, restaurants and supermarkets.
What had earlier started out as a community project, involving pop-ups then a take-out service, led to a fund-raising project which helped finance the opening of the cafe -a first permanent base -in Higham Place. And there they've been offering an inspired menu which changes daily due to what ingredients are collected and donated from across the North East -which amounts to between one-and-a-half and two tonnes of food a week.
The new menu, created by the cafe's chef and volunteer kitchen team, offers between six and eight dishes which are being priced on a sliding scale according to how plentiful the ingredients are and the skill needed to produce the dish. Diners are able to snap up a bargain, with prices starting at £4, and Jess, co-founder of the Bind community interest company behind Magic Hat, says: "We have had an incredibly positive response to the new dynamic menu structure.
"Our customers like its simplicity and it allows us to really focus on tackling the issue of food waste and celebrate the time and expertise that goes into creating every dish." She points out that the surplus ingredients which the cafe collects and uses would otherwise be wasted.
She said: "Since we have no control over our supply, inevitably there are only limited amounts of some options whilst others are plentiful. Equally, some dishes involve high levels of skill and lots of time to perfect, whereas others stay very close to the ingredients' pure form.
"That is how we determine a dish's price. Whether you choose an abundant dish and pay the lowest price on the menu, or one that is more scarce and time-consuming at a higher price, you'll...
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