LONDON — Less than a year after being named the UK’s first restaurant to earn a coveted Michelin star for a completely vegan menu, Plates London is packing out its tiny Shoreditch dining room with hardly any customers who still eat meat or fish elsewhere. At around 95% non-vegan, says chef-owner Kirk Haworth, (the restaurant is for inventive modern cooking rather than lifestyle,” Dec. 1, 2025.
Plates London’s game-changer date was last month, when it became the UK’s first vegan restaurant to receive a Michelin star at the Great Britain and Ireland awards ceremony in Glasgow in February, with inspectors commending Haworth for applying classical technique to an entirely plant-based menu. Guardian’s report from the awards night spoke about how the Old Street restaurant offers a tasting menu built on flavour, excitement and innovation rather than labels, a theme echoed in a behind-the-scenes piece by the Michelin Guide.
How Plates London made vegan fine dining a must-book for the mainstream
Haworth, who opened the restaurant with his sister Keeley, hardly ever mentions “vegan” in the dining room (he says food should be judged on flavour, he told a new Reuters profile of the restaurant). The strategy appears to be working: inspectors report an earthy, natural room with “thoughtfully layered” dishes like maitake mushroom with black bean mole and a raw cacao gateau that aims to startle carnivores as much as it does the most entrenched of plant-based diners.
According to the Michelin Guide’s official entry, Plates London is a one-star restaurant in Hoxton, with a “stripped-back yet stylish” room, counter seating, and celeriac cookery that’s awesome: (Chef of the Year Alex) Gauthier treats vegetables with ‘the respect they deserve.’ The 25-cover restaurant opens just four days a week and is fully booked many months in advance, part of a wave of London venues demonstrating that plant-based menus can find a place at the luxury end of the market.
From pop-up experiment to Michelin star for Plates London
Well before the star, Haworth had been trialling the Plates London concept in mini pop-ups across town. It was a Hot Dinners preview in 2018, which highlighted Plates as a one-night-a-week plant-based restaurant on Kingsland Road with “early versions of the vegetable-led tasting menu that would become the brand”.
His conversion to plant-led cooking was expedited by chronic illness — after years at the helm of Michelin-starred kitchens, Haworth wasn’t much for vegetables until he fell back on a diet heavy in plants as he recovered from Lyme disease, which he described later in an earlier profile in wellness journal The Nue Co. Two years later, in 2021, he was competing as the first all-plant-based chef on BBC’s Great British Menu and explaining how he tried to convince sceptical judges that vegan food could be luxurious, complex and “all those things,” as he told Haworth in an interview last year on The Staff Canteen.
In the broader context of the UK food scene, the restaurant’s ascent is a timely indicator of a plant-based tipping point that has been brewing for years. A 2019 Guardian analysis of vegan takeaways found that orders of meat-free meals increased nearly fivefold from 2016 to 2018, in part because flexitarian diners were willing to dabble but not stick with it. It’s now been awarded Michelin status for its efforts, and, today, London has been named as one of the world’s most vegan-friendly cities, with a recent guide by Conde Nast Traveller to London’s vegan scene that noted Plates in Shoreditch is currently the only fully plant-based restaurant in the capital holding a Michelin star.
That background goes some way toward explaining why the vast majority of those booking in at Plates London are not vegan in any shape or form. For them, the interest isn’t only in avoiding animal products but rather in summoning a moment: the UK’s first vegan Michelin-starred restaurant rubbing shoulders with well-worn fine-dining establishments and yet attracting a fresh set of diners snapping up reservations. That message appears to be reaching far beyond the community of lifelong vegans: A packed dining room reflects that, as Haworth told reporters after the star was announced — then quoted in Guardian coverage at the time — his mission is to pursue “flavour, excitement and innovation” rather than labels.
