The World’s 10 Best Sustainable Restaurants
Sustainable restaurants turn environmental responsibility into a dining style: seasonal produce, low-waste kitchen practices, regenerative farming, fish and meat choices shaped by ecosystem impact, and menus that use every part of an ingredient. In this guide’s lineup, that theme is expressed through very different cuisines and settings, from urban fine dining to rural farm-led kitchens. The common thread is a commitment to sourcing and cooking that tries to reduce harm while still pursuing high-level flavor and hospitality. Many of these restaurants are also known for tying sustainability to terroir and technique. Some center gardens, coastal sourcing, or closed-loop thinking; others build menus around local growers, forgotten vegetables, or underused species. The result is not a single cuisine, but a shared dining philosophy: food that reflects place, season, and responsibility. That makes the category especially appealing for travelers looking for restaurants where ethics and excellence overlap. Because sustainability is a practice rather than a dish, the most convincing examples are restaurants that can show it across the whole experience: the ingredients on the plate, the suppliers behind them, and the way the kitchen handles waste, energy, and seasonality. This collection highlights restaurants widely associated with that approach, offering a useful cross-section of how chefs around the world are rethinking fine dining through a sustainability lens.
Silo
London, UK
Silo is a restaurant in First floor, Unit 7 Queens Yard, White Post Lane, E9 5EN, in London’s Hackney Wick district. The business presents itself as the world’s first zero waste restaurant, and its current official website places it in partnership with CRATE Brewery at The White Building since October 2019. The site also describes the kitchen as working from a closed-loop approach shaped by natural farming and sustainability. The menu is built from ingredients in their whole form, with the restaurant saying it grinds its own flour from ancient wheat varieties, churns its own butter and rolls its own oats. It also highlights a root-to-leaf and nose-to-tail philosophy, using animal and vegetable produce as fully as possible, together with in-house fermentation to create garums and other flavour bases. That gives the food a strongly craft-led, contemporary character rather than a conventional brasserie style. On the practical side, Silo offers reservations for tables of up to eight in the main dining room, while walk-ins are welcomed when space allows. The official private-hire information says a separate private dining room is available for parties of up to fourteen guests, with booking enquiries handled directly by email. This suggests a compact, intimate dining room with a second space for smaller gatherings. The restaurant’s zero-waste identity extends beyond the plate into the room itself. Its official philosophy page explains that reusable deliveries, compostable residual waste, upcycled furniture and fittings, and materials such as mycelium, crushed wine bottles and recycled packaging are all part of the operating model. The result is a restaurant experience centred on sustainability, fermentation and careful use of ingredients, with the design reinforcing the same message throughout.
Azurmendi
Spain
Azurmendi is Eneko Atxa's restaurant in Larrabetzu, Biscay, where Basque culinary traditions meet contemporary technique. Its Gran Menú unfolds through several spaces: a welcome picnic, a kitchen table, a garden sequence and the main dining experience. Preparations explore ingredients in different forms, including tomato presented through its skin, pulp, flesh and whey. The menu moves on to seafood, vegetables and meat, with dishes such as oyster with seaweed, charcoal-grilled lobster and Iberian pork cheek. The building was conceived around its relationship with nature; a greenhouse supplies some kitchen produce, while renewable energy and rainwater collection form part of its design.
Toyo Eatery
Philippines
Toyo Eatery explores Filipino food at The Alley at Karrivin in Makati. Chef Jordy Navarra and his wife and business partner May build the restaurant around local ingredients, producers and familiar flavours, translating them into tasting menus. Among the kitchen's established ideas is Bahay Kubo, a vegetable dish inspired by a children's folk song. Three-cut pork barbecue reworks a familiar street-food skewer, while heritage ingredients such as asin tibuok salt connect the food with traditional artisans. A plant-based tasting menu provides another route through Filipino cooking. The focus extends to relationships with suppliers and the handling of food waste, including partnerships that turn kitchen scraps into compost. These practices link the restaurant's culinary approach with the communities and land supplying its ingredients.
Brae
Australia
Brae combines Dan Hunter's restaurant, an organic farm and six guest suites on a hillside near Birregurra in Victoria's Otways hinterland. The kitchen chooses produce daily from its own land, local growers and other carefully selected suppliers, making the menu closely responsive to the farm's harvest. Paths wind through orchards, olive groves and vegetable beds, allowing diners staying overnight to see the landscape that supplies the restaurant. The architecturally designed suites incorporate harvested rainwater and a worm-farm wastewater system. Guided farm tours offer another way to understand the growing operation. Accommodation is reserved for guests with a same-day dining booking, keeping the overnight experience closely connected to the meal.
L'Enclume
United Kingdom
L’Enclume occupies a former thirteenth-century blacksmith’s workshop in Cartmel, where Simon Rogan’s cooking begins with the seasonal ingredients of Our Farm and nearby producers. Produce is discussed with the growing team and developed in Aulis before dishes reach the restaurant. The result is a tasting experience that changes with the harvest. Recent combinations include beetroot with salted mackerel and sunflower seed, Orkney scallop with kohlrabi and preserved magnolia, and turbot with carrots and blackcurrant leaves. A shorter lunch menu provides another format. Six-seat Aulis Cartmel offers a closer view of the chefs at work, while rooms scattered around the village allow dinner to become an overnight stay with breakfast at Rogan & Co.
FYN
South Africa
FYN is a restaurant in Cape Town, South Africa, trading from the 5th floor of Speaker’s Corner at 37 Parliament Street in the city centre. The restaurant presents itself as a modern African dining room shaped by South African ingredients and a Japanese culinary philosophy, with a menu built around seasonality and restraint rather than a fixed à la carte format. Its current online menus show lunch and dinner seatings, with the option of experience-style dining and separate plant-based and pescatarian menus. The kitchen’s food language draws on the Cape and broader South African landscape: dishes reference Cape Peninsula tuna, kingklip, langoustine, springbok, ostrich, lamb, kelp, abalone and indigenous botanicals such as buchu, Cape mountain sage and kapokbos. The official site also notes that FYN can accommodate most dietary needs with prior notice, while excluding severe or fatal allergies and allium or garlic allergies. Menus indicate a cashless payment policy and a discretionary service charge. The restaurant’s service is organised around tasting-menu experiences for lunch and dinner, with paired drinks available, including a South African terroir pairing and a cellar and rarities pairing. Current menus show a weekday-to-Saturday schedule, with lunch and dinner seatings at set times and some lunch formats available only for a limited period. The site also states that guests may order the dinner experience at lunch if seated by 13:00, which reinforces the restaurant’s tightly managed pacing. FYN’s online identity emphasises a compact, elevated city-centre setting rather than a broad hotel-style operation. The restaurant describes its space as intentionally balanced between stillness and energy, and its team is led by chef-founder Peter Tempelhoff, culinary director Ashley Moss and sommelier and service director Jennifer Hugé. Together, the setting, menu structure and ingredient-led cooking create a precise, contemporary fine-dining experience anchored in Cape Town’s urban and coastal character.
SingleThread
California
SingleThread connects a restaurant and small inn in Healdsburg with a 24-acre farm in Dry Creek Valley. Chef Kyle Connaughton and farmer Katina Connaughton build the experience around the seasons, with the farm growing hundreds of culinary crop varieties as well as flowers for the property. The restaurant's ten-course tasting menu follows that harvest, bringing the farm's produce into a meal in the centre of Sonoma wine country. Five guestrooms occupy the second floor, including a larger suite. Overnight guests receive a guaranteed restaurant reservation and a choice of Japanese or Sonoma-style breakfast; in-room dining is also available. The farm, kitchen and inn give the visit a connected agricultural and culinary focus.
Mirazur
Menton
Mauro Colagreco's Mirazur sits above the Mediterranean in Menton, close to the Italian border. The dining room looks across the Bay of Garavan towards the old town, placing the coast in view while the kitchen takes its direction from five hectares of gardens. A nine-sequence surprise menu responds to the day's harvest and deliveries of fish and meat. Four recurring themes, Roots, Leaves, Flowers and Fruits, follow the restaurant's biodynamic calendar, giving different parts of the plant a central role in the meal. The main dining room has restrained materials and plant arrangements, while La Mesa seats up to eight guests within the kitchen, close to the chefs at work. A sheltered patio offers another space to extend the occasion outdoors.
Aponiente
Spain
Aponiente is a restaurant in El Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz, in southern Spain, set in the old 19th-century tidal mill in the Bahía de Cádiz Natural Park. The official information places it behind the town’s railway station, beside the Caño de la Madre Vieja and close to the Guadalete marshes. Parking is available, while rail or taxi arrival is recommended, which suits a site shaped by water, salt and the estuary landscape rather than a conventional city-centre setting. The restaurant is led by Ángel León and works with a tasting-menu format built in acts, moving through snacks, cold dishes, hot dishes, desserts and petit fours. Wine pairing is offered, alongside a list of Spanish and international wines. This structure gives the meal a planned progression and places the kitchen’s marine ideas at the centre of the experience, rather than offering an à la carte approach or a more casual service style. Aponiente’s menu shows a clearly sea-led and saltmarsh-led character, with ingredients and dishes such as sea lettuce, halophytes, sea urchin, razor clams, squid, bluefin cheeks, sardines, seaweeds and tidal plants. That range reflects both the surrounding marsh environment and the restaurant’s long interest in marine biodiversity. The result is a cuisine rooted in the local estuary and coastal ecology, with flavours and textures drawn from the waters and banks around the mill. Practical details from the official FAQ note that there is no formal dress code, although long trousers and closed shoes are preferred. The meal usually lasts around three to three and a half hours, and the restaurant advises that small children can only be accommodated by prior arrangement with reservations. It does not provide highchairs or babysitting, and the overall experience is therefore geared to a settled, long-form tasting visit for adults and older diners.
Arpege
France
At Arpège on Rue de Varenne, Alain Passard makes the garden the centre of a Parisian gastronomic experience. Vegetables, fruit, herbs and flowers shape the cooking, with honey from the restaurant’s own hives also finding a place in the kitchen. Passard’s approach gives familiar produce the attention normally reserved for luxury ingredients, inviting diners to consider its colour, texture and changing character. Lunch and dinner offer different opportunities to explore that vision. The move to an entirely plant-focused kitchen in 2025 gives this long-established restaurant a particularly clear identity: an expression of its chef’s continuing fascination with what the garden can provide.