Vegan takeaway meals on offer from restaurant

LOVERS of late-night kebabs or meat-feast pizzas might think it misses the point, but now there’s a vegan food delivery service in Watlington.

The town is the 13th outlet for Sacred Chow, a business set up by Julia and Stuart Mainwaring to prove that takeaway food can also be healthy.

The plant-based meals are cooked in the kitchens at the Taj Club House restaurant in High Street and delivered to customers in the town and surrounding area.

Mrs Mainwaring, 49, hopes that the service will become successful enough for her to open her own
restaurant.

She said: “We want to prove that there is no reason why takeaway food has to be unhealthy. People seem to think that takeaway food has to be bad for you —they think of pizza or processed food.

“We want to serve food that is good for you and good for the planet. We love what we do and plant-based food is becoming more and more popular.”

Mrs and Mr Mainwaring started the business when the first coronavirus lockdown began in March last year and now have outlets in Surrey, where they live, Hampshire, Sussex, Berkshire and Oxfordshire.

Mrs Mainswaring moved into Watlington during lockdown last year, when there was high demand for takeaways, with the help of her husband Stuart, who used to be head of ventures for Just Eat, the online food and delivery service, and their children, Harry, 21, and Lyla, 14.

Mrs Mainwaring said: “It was a family effort — Lyla would help cook the meals while Harry, who has a degree in computer science, built the website and app and I was the delivery driver.”

Chef Luke Phillips creates and develops the recipes in Sacred Chow’s production kitchen in Alton, Hampshire. The food is then finished off at the kitchens of the partner restaurants such as Taj Club House.

The menu includes dishes inspired by Thailand, Italy, Morocco, Japan and Mexico and customers can see the list of ingredients used to prepare them when ordering online. Mrs Mainwaring said: “We wanted to have a small menu but we made it multicultural and international. Luke is very passionate about his food and about foraging and he developed all our recipes.”

Mr Phillips, 38, spent three years working in France and was a catering manager at Southampton University, where he started to experiment with plant-based and sustainable food.

He said: “I noticed how sustainable food choices were important for people in the younger age group and I wanted to focus on that.

“Sacred Chow has given me the opportunity to focus entirely on plant-based food.

“As a chef, your focus should be on making every kind of food taste great and that’s the same with plant-based — you want to get the best out of the products you use.

“We just want to create food that people will love. It is challenging because there’s only one of me but I’ve been redesigning and making changes to the recipes to make them as great as they can be.”

The menu includes sweet potato katsu curry, lentil ragu, Thai green tofu curry and black bean chilli.

Mrs Mainwaring, who also runs an online homewares company, said she chose to expand to Watlington as she saw a gap in the market.

“There’s not a huge amount of takeaway choices for a town that is growing like Watlington,” she said. “We know people are willing to try to eat more vegan food. Eighty per cent of our customers are meat eaters that enjoy vegan food too. We want to make sure that they can make healthy choices when it comes to takeaway food.”

Mrs Mainwaring, whose family eats predominantly plant-based food, said that takeaway food could also be expensive as well as damaging to the environment because of the amount of single plastic that was used for the containers holding the food.

“Our aim is to sell it at a reasonable price because there is no reason why cheap food should be unhealthy,” she said.

“Everything we use is completely recyclable — we care about the environment and we don’t use any plastic at all. Takeaway food usually comes with a lot of plastic bags and polystyrene but we thought, ‘We really don’t need that’, we want to do our bit for the environment.”

Mrs Mainwaring said her family decided to eat mainly plant-based food as they care for the environment and animals.

“When my husband worked for Just Eat he did a lot of research on the impact on the environment of eating meat.

“The amount of meat consumed today is just not sustainable and we need to look at sustainable ways to feed ourselves.”

The service is available seven days a week from 5pm to 10pm.