Yum Bug: The London restaurant ditching beef for bugs

Sign as much as IndyEat’s free e-newsletter for weekly recipes, foodie options and cookbook releases

Get our foods and drinks e-newsletter for free

Sorry, did you say worm?” I virtually splutter at Leonard Trang, govt chef at omakase bar Juno. He’s simply casually talked about that the piece of tuna nigiri in my mouth is garnished with floor mezcal-cured agave worm. Like it’s no extra attention-grabbing than common seasoning. I believed it took so much for an ingredient to shock me lately – clearly, I used to be unsuitable.

The poster youngster of fussy consuming rising up – I’d choose onions out of every little thing and performatively retch on the sight of broccoli – now I’m consuming a dehydrated, powdered model of one in every of my least favorite creatures. My reformed consuming habits have lengthy been a supply of amusement for my mother and father, siblings and long-suffering associates.

But nonetheless, worms are on one other degree of the omnivore scale. In my defence, it wasn’t within the press launch; the truth is, not a lot in any respect is talked about concerning the bug providing at Juno, the new-ish omakase bar hidden behind a curtain on the primary ground of Mexican-Japanese restaurant Los Mochis in Notting Hill. That’s by design, Trang tells me. “You wouldn’t talk about salt and pepper and things like that. It’s just another ingredient, and we’re trying to normalise it a bit.”

I suppose that at an intimate six-seater counter – the smallest in London – they’d additionally prefer to be out of spitting vary. Trang laughs mischievously; ready till the final potential second to reveal his secret ingredient can also be deliberate. “I don’t tell people it’s bugs until they’ve eaten it because we don’t want to poison their minds, because they’ll immediately think it’s gross.”

In truth, it’s not gross in any respect. It’s subtler than you’d suppose; sweeter, too, with a little bit of umami and loads of smoke from the mezcal. The simplicity of sushi is the proper automobile to hold the complicated flavours, albeit in small doses: Trang dabs a dusted pinky finger-sized quantity on each bit earlier than handing it over.

Gusano, the worms, are one in every of three floor bugs you’ll discover lined up on the bar at Juno, although you wouldn’t understand it. They masquerade as harmless little pots of seasonings – proper subsequent to the salt. The others are chicatanas (flying ants) and chapuline (grasshoppers), and Trang principally makes use of them on the nigiri. “It’s like a blank canvas. It has a very subtle flavour so I’ve chosen the bugs and the spices to just put a little bit of an accentuation on it, an emphasis, to enhance the flavour of the fish, rather than taking over.” True, a dab is preferable to a spoonful of the stuff; it packs a punch.

The bugs arrived on the counter as a pure evolution of the restaurant, which has at all times been centered on sustainability and whose menu displays the cuisines Trang encounters on his travels.

He got here throughout the bugs in Oaxaca, the place they’ve been on the menu way back to the sixteenth century once they’re an important protein supply earlier than the Spanish launched domesticated animals. “Chicatanas (flying ants) are very, very rare,” he tells me. “You can harvest them just one day a year. They come out early in the morning around 2 or 3am, and if the sun comes up, it becomes very difficult” to catch them. Last 12 months, Trang travelled to Mexico for the harvest – which usually happens after the primary main rainstorm in spring floods the ants’ nests – as a result of he “really wanted to experience what the farmers experience when catching these bugs. It’s very difficult because they are flying and they are biting you.” Some of the ants fall to the bottom and are gathered by foragers, whereas extra daring collectors stand in buckets of water to keep away from getting bitten. They’re not straightforward to catch mid-flight, and so they’re round for solely a few days, so the harvest needs to be swift. The journey gave him a full appreciation of the method. I, in the meantime, am horrified by the prospect and will likely be sticking to the consuming half.

He additionally got here throughout the mezcal-cured worms in Oaxaca, after spying them in a store window. In the Nineteen Fifties, a mezcal brewer found a larva in a batch and thought it improved the flavour. Other producers rapidly jumped on the bandwagon. Today, you’ll usually see pictures served with a worm floating inside. It was lengthy thought that consuming the worm had hallucinogenic or aphrodisiac results – straightforward to see how they drew that conclusion after downing a bottle of mezcal. In some components of Mexico, it’s conventional for the maid of honour to eat the worm on a hen do. “I asked the guy if I could taste it,” says Trang. “It was unlike anything I’d had before. I had to use it in my work.”

Part of that work takes place in Mexico, the place the bugs are heated over a flat griddle to dry and protect them. Back within the UK, Trang grinds them right into a powder with a texture not dissimilar to salt, and experiments with the flavour by including completely different elements. “I don’t like it to be too strong a flavour for the nigiri because I have to deal with a delicate balance between smoky and sweetness and saltiness,” he explains. He provides arbol chilli to the chicatanas to present them extra of a kick, and to the gusano, to stability out the smokiness. As he’s solely utilizing a dab right here and there, a single journey to Mexico can provide the restaurant for a very long time.

But it’s the sustainability of edible bugs that first attracted Trang to the concept. Sustainability and seasonality have at all times been embedded within the idea at Los Mochis – they supply the very best elements from the very best, principally native, suppliers – so introducing bugs by no means felt outlandish. “Insects are very sustainable because they don’t use up any resources. They don’t need any facilities or big spaces with water and things like that,” he says. They’re usually harvested, not farmed, within the wild the place they’re thought-about pests. “And they’re also a very high source of protein and they have natural amino acids, which are good for the body.” So you’ll be able to guzzle down that gusano guilt-free.

Edible bugs are hardly a brand new idea. Indeed, they’ve been eaten in much less finicky international locations for centuries, together with Trang’s dwelling nation Japan. A number of years in the past, they grew to become a short-lived “trend” within the UK: sustainable, nutritious, tasty and absolutely destined for a grocery store close to you. But they by no means fairly took off (pun supposed). And, really, Trang doesn’t need them to. He prefers to make use of them as a secret seasoning reasonably than a full-blown protein various. “I don’t want bugs to become a main meal. If they become really popular, they’re going to do mass production. If they do mass production, they’re going to use chemicals.”

He may not be that eager to study, then, that bugs aren’t restricted to hen dos in Mexico or £200 tasting menus in London. Or that a few pioneering restaurateurs on the opposite facet of city see a lot better potential – and longevity – within the bug development.

So a lot so, they’re betting their financial savings on it. After launching an insect-ready meal supply service in lockdown and a profitable pop-up restaurant in 2023, Leo Taylor and buddy Aaron Thomas opened their first everlasting website Yum Bug earlier this 12 months. The tagline is: “Turning CRICKETS into delicious meat that’s sustainable AF”. Needless to say, it’s aimed toward fairly a distinct goal market. One with TikTok.

For Taylor, who’s half Thai and grew up throughout southeast Asia, consuming bugs “was just part of the everyday of growing up”, however he by no means got down to make it a part of the on a regular basis in London. He was working in design when he noticed a report from the UN in 2013 that mentioned bugs as a meals supply might assist enhance vitamin, cut back air pollution and assist battle world starvation.

Several years later got here Covid-19 and, with extra time on their arms throughout lockdown, Taylor and Thomas “decided to launch our first product, a recipe box called the Bug Box”, which they put collectively in his mum’s storage – “the best place to experiment with cooking with insects,” he jests. The recipes included cricket and bean stew, chilli con cricket, cricket jalfrezi and cricket lasagne.

With some funding from “people like the Bransons … as well as a big one recently, Brewdog”, Yum Bug’s first iteration was a pop-up at Old Street’s The Bower final October. Chefs like Sam Clark, Clem Haxby, Tim Molena and James Nathan churned out dishes like cricket mince topped with hummus, Calabrian chilli and tomato pappardelle with cricket items, cricket ragu… you get the concept. It was a success. If solely the identify Kricket hadn’t already been trademarked by an Indian restaurant chain.

“James Watt, the founder of BrewDog, was the one who said to us that maybe we should open the restaurant and we unequivocally said that was a terrible idea, because of all the restaurants closing down at the moment. It’s a tough place to be in, let alone if your entire offering is insects,” Taylor says. I might have thought a lot the identical if the person behind a marketing campaign to chuck taxidermy cats over parliament from a helicopter urged such a factor. Turns out, this was one in every of his higher concepts – inside a number of months of opening, they have been “serving thousands of people”.

The menu is way the identical because the pop-up: bug-based small plates. “Everything from the burrata to the dessert all contains insects. Anywhere that you would typically find meat, there would be the insect version,” he says. “We also use the whole insect, so we’ve got roasted cricket cooked into a chilli oil dressed over a burrata. That’s a crowd favourite.” So is the cricket mince kofta, their best-selling dish, and the cricket brisket tacos.

It all sounds fairly good to me – however what do fussy Londoners suppose? Whole crickets have been “a much harder sell. People don’t like to eat something that’s got eyes on it. If you think about fish or seafood, people can be weirded out,” Taylor explains. “We find that when it doesn’t look like an insect, that immediately helps a lot.”

In the equally aggressive relationship scene, it’s turn out to be considerably of a novelty. “We’ve had quite a few date nights where the person booking hasn’t necessarily told the other person what it is. So there’s been a freakout at the door, but typically they’re coming in and I think what’s good about the small plate concept is it’s very non-committal,” says Taylor. I can’t determine which is extra alarming: that my date would possibly trick me into consuming a burrata with a cricket on it or that I’m listening to somebody extol the virtues of small plates.

Either manner, it’s an idea persons are clearly keen to purchase into. I suppose after final 12 months’s tripe fascination, it was solely a matter of time earlier than one thing even weirder appeared on menus.

While the providing at Yum Bug could be a far cry from that at Juno, Taylor’s motivations to get into the bug enterprise have been a lot the identical. He cites the truth that “they’re one of the most sustainable proteins in the world.” He may need zero expertise in operating a restaurant, however he’s acquired the details to again it up: “Crickets use 15 times less carbon dioxide compared to beef. It’s the same amount of protein for a fraction of the water and land compared to traditional livestock. You’re looking at about 10 times less land for the same amount of food output.” It helps that they supply their crickets from a farm up the highway in Cambridgeshire, reasonably than reserving a return flight to Mexico to catch them by hand.

“And from a nutritional perspective, our mince has 50 per cent more protein than your supermarket beef mince. There’s more iron than spinach, more calcium than milk, more potassium than bananas, more B12 than red meat, more fibre than brown rice, similar omega 3 and 6 to salmon. It’s an ongoing list.”

That record additionally features a buzzword from the 2024 bingo card: ultra-processed. “If you look at the meat alternatives category right now” – although Taylor considers Yum Bug to be a protein various, because it’s nonetheless meat – “a lot of stuff is full of ultra-processed ingredients. In order to get a plant-based thing to look like meat and bleed, you have to add loads of stuff that’s not particularly great for us.” It’s straight out of the Tim Spector playbook. “Our mince, as an example, contains three ingredients: it’s cricket, wholewheat flour and salt. And 75 per cent cricket – so natural, high-quality food.”

OK, we get it. Clearly convincing those who we must be ditching cow for cricket isn’t as far out because it may need appeared a decade in the past. The greatest challenge Yum Bug is going through is definitely one in every of enterprise and paperwork. While we’re at a premium on beef proper now – you’re round £9 or £10 per kilo for the good things – crickets are available in at about £12 per kilo, and Yum Bug sells it on for £15. “One of our central challenges right now is getting prices down.” In a market and period as difficult as this one, I don’t want to inform him that will probably be crucial to their survival.

Secondly, although Yum Bug selected crickets for their sustainability, dietary advantages and since they’re the tastiest, there’s additionally laws that makes it unlawful for them to promote something apart from a handful of species. So regardless of that UN report suggesting that wasps, beetles and different bugs are underutilised as meals for each individuals and livestock, there’s some solution to go in persuading legislators that bugs have a spot in British diets for the sake of the setting and public well being.

It’s definitely not me, or the hundreds of individuals reserving up these eating places, that want convincing. The bug development has properly and really landed.