Nestled in an old brick coaching house, Alchemilla is a progressive, forward-thinking restaurant in Nottingham run by Restaurant Sat Bains alumni Alex Bond. The restaurant front is rather unnassuming, but inside you'll find a beautiful, brutalist temple of exposed brick, with plants running wild over the walls and light spilling in through the glass ceiling. It's clear that a great deal of work has gone into the restaurant, not least because much of the space that exists now had to be excavated by the team to make room for the kitchen and extra tables.
Peruse the menu and Bond's time alongside Sat Bains is clear - this is a menu full of modern ideas, but many of them are applied to plants and vegetables. Alchemilla is far from a vegetarian restaurant, but meat and fish are often used to highlight the vegetables, rather than as the star attraction. Examples of dishes include BBQ lobster with koji corn and kimchi, tomato with oyster and gooseberry and crab with duck liver and leek.
Alchemilla offers a choice of tasting menus - five, seven or ten courses, as well as vegetarian, pescatarian and vegan tasting menus. Even more impressive, the restaurant does a staggering amount of work in-house, not only cooking but also baking bread, aging their own meat, and pickling and fermenting ingredients to use throughout the year. Even something like Marmite - so easily bought in - is homemade using leftover sourdough and yeast.
Alchemilla won a Michelin star in 2019 and has continued to chart a progressive path for modern, waste-free British cooking. The restaurant also has a roof terrace complete with sparkling wine bar that carries the whole Nyetimber range, as well as offering custom made cocktails.