A Month in the new Community Cafe @ Riverhouse - Surplus Menus and Chatty Staff!
Our first big project is our new sustainable Community Cafe which we want to open up to everybody in the community. It is part of our concerted effort to make Riverhouse into a sustainable venue.. reducing waste, recycling, composting and reducing our carbon footprint where possible.
Our Menu is very special in more ways than one. Donated surplus food is used to create wonderful dishes. M&S are providing food they cannot sell, wrongly labelled, a big mis-shapen etc... everything is well within sell by date.. and our team of staff and volunteers are transforming whatever we get into healthy gorgeous recipes and dealing with some of the 19million tonnes of food that hit the bins every year.
We spent a lovely week in the sunshine kitting out the kitchen before we opened at the end of March and 3 weeks into the project it is proving to be a real success.
We gave our tables a facelift with new table cloths and a bit of paint,
and tried out some recipes on our volunteers. 
Our regular Lunchtime Concert goers were treated to top-side of beef, (about to be thrown away just because it was wrongly labelled) something which their ticket price would not have allowed us to manage before this project took off.Most importantly we have made enough money to be able to donate some meals to some local charities to distribute to good causes.
Many of our staff have been with us for a long time and are loving the new creativity, and we have new staff joining and wonderful new volunteers. If you are interested in helping out either cooking 'ready, steady, cook' style or serving in the cafe, or just sitting at a table and chatting to visitors, we would love to hear from you.
