No restaurant for the wicked: how viral chef Sam Buckley put ethics at the centre of eating out

It wasn’t a bad idea. In a bid to show how the fast food burger — something you can get at the press of a button, anywhere, at any time — was in fact a finite resource, chef Sam Buckley would make burgers out of Maraschino. Maraschino was a lustrous red poll cow whose carcass would be butchered into some 1,200 burgers. Once they were sold, the pop up would shut. It would make people think about the cows being slaughtered every day to make millions of fast food burgers sold worldwide.

Except things didn’t pan out that way. The burgers sold out — at £12.50 apiece. But the money wasn’t as important as the message. In a short video, Buckley darted around the tiny kitchen, explaining his vision. “This is a response to transparency in fast food restaurants around the world,” he said. He and his team were “exploring fast food from a social and historical context.” 

It’s safe to say the response wasn’t what he had hoped for. Buckley, from Stockport, has run one of the most sustainable restaurants in the UK for close to a decade — Where The Light Gets In. During that time he has been celebrated, and has grown used to speaking about his food in this conceptual way, usually to customers paying three-figure sums for the privilege. What he was saying in the video was nothing out of the ordinary for him. It seemed at best, a noble attempt to draw attention to a global issue and at worst, a quirky way of marketing a burger. 

But the internet saw something else: a pompous hipster, a classic symptom of the city Manchester has become, and what’s gone wrong with it. The first tweet I saw about the pop-up, which had about five million views, captured the feeling of many coming across Buckley’s way of describing his work. It said: “New biggest bellend in Manchester just dropped”.

In the following weeks, Buckley was hosting more pop-ups and workshops around the city. Meeting him multiple times over that period, I found someone with deep-seated principles, whose work occasionally meant bending those same principles. He seems excited and exhausted by his industry in equal measures. “It’s a privilege to be ethical,” he says. “But that’s my main conflict.” 

The soul of a 1,000-year-old

I meet Buckley on a brisk February afternoon in Stockport. We go to a little Colombian restaurant with about six tables called Cafe Sanjuan. It’s a pleasant enough lunch, with Buckley sometimes slipping into the profound. At one point I ask his age and he tells me “I feel like I have the soul of a 1,000-year-old and the mind of a 12-year-old” (later he relents — he’s 42).

Buckley dresses in a tastefully dishevelled manner, and it’s difficult to tell whether his hair has been styled by a careful hand or a harsh wind. His general demeanour — fast-talking, a little brash — and his penchant for ribbed jumpers, makes it easier to imagine him manning a lighthouse than a stove. In fact, he doesn’t really consider himself a chef at all. His original passions were writing and music, playing bass for various bands as well as working as a journalist, covering food and music. But cooking, more as a medium than a craft, drew him to open his first restaurant, Where The Light Gets In, in an old coffee warehouse in Stockport in 2016. 

He started out as a chef while doing his A Levels. He wasn’t very good and people told him so. After leaving college, he worked for Gary Rhodes, and took a job at Juniper, a restaurant in Altrincham owned by the late Paul Kitching: “I was bullied, it was horrible. The hours were bad, I got stomach ulcers,” he says. “I was seventeen years old. Stress, no sleep.” After a while, he decided to go to university instead, studying journalism and finding work at magazines. After joining a band and touring Europe, he came home again in 2011 to find himself washing pots on Thomas Street in the Northern Quarter. 

It was around this time that he started reading about restaurants like Noma in Copenhagen, and L’Enclume in the Lake District — institutions listed amongst the best in the world. He saw something he didn’t recognise. There was no chugging 1.5L bottles of energy drinks to get through a shift or head chefs with speed in their lockers. Instead, the chefs there were foragers, artisans, thinkers. Their food was considered and regulated by the seasons. “Reading about them — and this is going to make me sound pretentious.” Buckley says, “There was an intelligence in these kitchens.” 

Eventually he secured a job at L’Enclume — but the reality didn’t square up with what he’d read about. Products he believed the restaurant was growing in-house were actually being bought in. The culture, which he describes now as a “shitshow”, was in fact not all that different from the kitchens he thought he was escaping. 

A couple of other possible lives followed in quick succession: travelling for 18 months, then going to India with an idea for a screenplay he would only tell me about off the record, before eventually returning to Stockport. It was time to settle down. He decided he would answer the siren call of the hospitality industry and open a restaurant — except it would be different to other places. It would execute the more cerebral approach he’d hoped L’Enclume would offer: “I think it [opening Where The Light Gets In] was me putting my money where my mouth is”. 

Internal conflict

These days, Stockport town centre is thriving. You’ll have heard about it being dubbed “the new Berlin”. Last year, when the town was voted the best place to live in the North West, the reviews raved less about the leafy suburbs and more about the eclectic centre.

But back in 2016, when Buckley returned hoping to open his own place, the town centre didn’t have that same upmarket feel. In fact, the council was crying out for new businesses to open, so much so that it only took a friend of Buckley’s mentioning his plans of opening a restaurant to someone at the council for them to show him a site. “That is how desperate they were for someone to do something in Stockport: a guy says to someone at the council, ‘I’ve got a friend who’s a chef who wants to open a restaurant,’ and they’re calling me. Those were the only credentials I needed.”

The old coffee warehouse, now an airy space suffused with light, was in semi-ruin. Buckley remembers not being particularly impressed on seeing the building. “But in a really corny way, I woke up the next morning with an idea. It’s three levels. So there’d be three levels of business, sort of holistic, permaculture — I like that word — inclusive business, where everything could work together.”

Buckley set about gutting and refitting it, opening the restaurant in the October that year. Within a month, GQ was telling its readers “the best restaurant you’ve never heard of is in Stockport”. The media in general was quick to highlight Buckley’s Michelin-connections, and how unexpected a location he had opened in.

The restaurant works with ingredients it either grows itself or supplies directly from butchers, fishermen and farmers who match its own sustainable principles. When you’re served a dish at Where The Light Gets In, you aren’t just going to be told what’s on the plate, but also where it came from, how it was farmed, who farmed it and, as with the case of Maraschino, what its name was. This has become an increasingly common trend in recent years. But back in 2016, Buckley’s was one of few restaurants in the UK offering this. In 2021, it was awarded a “green star” — recognition of its sustainable approach — by Michelin. 

That area it opened in is now referred to as “Stockport Old Town”, in the way you might describe the trendier parts of European cities. Buckley’s restaurant had no small role in that rebrand, but when I mention the part he played in Stockport’s renaissance, he says: “yeah, I get blamed for it, a lot. I don’t really like it. The ‘gentrification’ word as well. That isn’t what we did, and I don’t think I am.”

He’s critical of the development of Manchester and surrounding towns, honing in specifically on Ancoats, which he says has become a sterile graduate playground: “Knocking those houses down and building them back up for kids who have just come out of uni and know no better. Essentially still living a university life with a Co-op on one side and an orange wine shop on the other, that is gentrification.”

But when I suggest that his restaurant contributed, even helped start, the recent transformation of Stockport, he doesn’t believe it equates. Setting up Where The Light Gets In didn’t require demolishing anyone’s home, he argues, and wasn’t even on the high street as it was defined at the time. 

But it did change the area, and the business has since opened what Buckley calls “this little wanky bakery” — which also does small plates — and a pottery workshop on its ground floor. The bakery only uses wild flour, and like his restaurant, is open and clear about the ingredients it uses and their sustainability. “I say it’s a wanky bakery but it’s not,” he says, “it’s an honest bakery.”

But that his businesses are haunts of the cultivated middle class — who, by way of taste or money, are more likely to gravitate towards better quality food — creates a conflict for Buckley. At his core, he just wants more people to be able to eat well, and to eat food that has a positive impact on them and the environment. The problem is that food of such high calibre isn’t so affordable, especially at his restaurant.

“I want to be a part of the community, and I struggle with how expensive it is.” The menu at Where The Light Gets In will soon be £140 per person — “that’s actually how much food costs, the food that we’re buying.”  Though Buckley has tried to defy this reality before: after the first lockdown, he dropped the price to £60 in an attempt to lure back customers and make the dining room more accessible. It worked: “the dining room diversified,” he says. “Suddenly, we weren’t feeding Jeremy Clarkson 32 times a night.” Buckley was having conversations with customers that he found interesting. He also lost about £170,000 and nearly went bankrupt. The price went back up. 

A Play in the City

On talking about gentrification in Ancoats and the city centre, Buckley tells me that he has one coping mechanism: he thinks of Nathan Barley. Barley was the eponymous character in a satirical sitcom about London media types inflicting their own brand of pretension on normal people. They describe themselves as guerrilla filmmakers and DJs, and drink coffee with smoked salmon in it because they think it’s cool. “It makes me smile to myself,” Buckley says. “It makes me feel a bit better.”

The irony: Buckley’s recent pop-up series “A Play in the City”, which included the Humbug burger restaurant, is the exact kind of place you’d expect to find Nathan Barley. It opened in a shipping container on stilts called The Bungalow in the Kampus neighbourhood off Aytoun Street, which was built by “social-impact developer” Capital and Centric. The promotional materials said it was about “how a city feeds itself,” and included lines like: “The city knows no limits, by now it proliferates through a precarious relationship with our disquieted selves and its limitlessness becomes our demand,” and “an appetite for creativity becomes intensified and as this takes effect the resilience of the world around us grows offering more opportunities for solace in knowledge.”

“It felt a bit like a sixth form project,” one hospitality consultant, who asked not to be named, says. Apart from the intense bubble of publicity brought in by the critical tweets catching fire and the Daily Mail running a piece leading with “New Manchester pop-up burger stand mocked as ‘pretentious’”, the rest of A Play in the City has passed without much fanfare. 

“One of my friends put it best,” Buckley tells me, describing the backlash. “We stepped out of our echo chamber”. For years, Buckley and his team were working with a captive audience, people paying through the nose because they wanted to hear about the name of the cow they were eating, or delight in the fact the radishes were grown in a garden on the roof. “We get our bellies rubbed by all these people, who are paying £140 for a meal to be told about a sheep.” Buckley tells me that he hasn’t had time to fully process how he feels about the tweets and articles ridiculing him and his ideas. But as I continued to attend the press lunches and workshops included in its programme, it became clear that Buckley was looking forward to A Play in The City coming to an end, and returning home to the comfort of his restaurant. 

But that won’t be until next month. The more practical reason for A Play in the City is that the building in which Where The Light Gets In is based is under renovation, which has meant the restaurant closing for six months. The pop-up is a way of keeping staff paid, and became more like an art project for Buckley. 

When his creative director — yes, Where The Light Gets In has a creative director — floated the idea of hosting the pop-up at Kampus, “I said go fuck yourself,” Buckley says. He wanted another run down, quirky space in Stockport. “I was dead against the idea of Capital and Centric,” he says, explaining how the developer doesn’t sell community, but flats to overseas investors. He says they aren’t good for the environment, community or identity of the city. 

“They’re selling Manchester to Chinese banks. They’re selling the idea of community to a disenfranchised youth,” Buckley says.

“But you’re doing a pop-up in their space?”

“I’m doing a pop-up in their space because I could not find anywhere else.”

Tim Heatley, the owner of Capital and Centric, was at the press lunch for Dacha, the pop-up that followed Humbug and was inspired by Russian allotments. On the phone to him about a separate story, I mentioned seeing him there and that I was writing about Buckley. “He seems like a nice guy!” Heatley said. “Never spoke to him. But he knows how to get the press and social media!”

‘Maybe I should just stop’

Of course, Buckley isn’t alone in serving food with a side order of navel gazing. Chefs all over the country do it, and elsewhere in Manchester, too. Tom Barnes, who Buckley trained with at L’Enclume, won a Michelin star last month for his restaurant, Skof, that opened a stone’s throw from Victoria train station last year. At Skof, guests are served the final course, a tiramisu, while being personally regaled by Barnes about how much his dying father, who could only eat soft foods at the end of his life, loved that tiramisu. It’s emotional, it’s supposed to create a sense of experience and highlight the significance of food in people’s lives. Some people like that. Others don’t. The food consultant falls into the latter camp: “I don’t want some middle-class kid from Stockport to tell me about food policy. Same as I don’t want to go to Skof and eat a tiramisu while this man tells me his dad is dead.”

What Buckley’s travails show is that it’s one thing to serve people food and tailor their experience in your restaurant, but it’s another to tell them what to think about while they eat. UK food policy is a huge issue, the global fast-food trade is immoral, but charging someone £12.50 for a burger is unlikely to make them realise that. Other aspects of the series worked much better. When I went to a talk on urban farming that was part of the programme, it was standing room only. A panel of farmers working across Oldham, Moss Side and Central Manchester talked about their work, and there was a lot of meaningful conversation about how inner city farming is overlooked. 

But the failure of the more conceptual attempts at talking about this stuff — and them getting the most coverage — seems to depress Buckley. “Maybe I should just stop,” he says at one point. “Maybe it’s not the right way of talking about it.” It’s clear in conversations with him that he cares, deeply, about this stuff. He seems tortured talking about the lack of education around growing and cooking food in the UK, and laments how stubborn people are in their opposition to giving up the instant gratification that supermarkets and chain restaurants have gotten us so used to. 

“I wish I didn’t take it so seriously,” he says once our soups have been cleared away. “My world is hell. I just want to have a fish finger butty with my daughter. But then I think about the ship that was bought from the Royal Navy as a fishing ship to bomb and dredge the seabed until it’s depleted of any life, dump the fumes in there, then freeze the fish on the boat so it can stay out there for months. Then Birds Eye makes hundreds of millions and the woman scanning it in Tesco can’t feed her kids.”

I’m left at a bit of a loss. “You’re kind of doing whatever the opposite of compartmentalising is,” I say. But anything else seems out of the question. “You can’t fight it, can you,” he says, about the majority who are willing to accept these apparent evils in exchange for convenience. And yet, Buckley keeps going. It’s something he argues about with his family, too. In fact, after the burger video went out, the first person to tell him it was pretentious was his cousin. “She was like, ‘are you fucking serious?’” he laughs. The idealism has just become part of who he is.

There were two no-shows to the final press event, which showcased the final phase of the pop-up: Supra. It didn’t help that Supra was all about Georgian feasting, so the two no-shows meant quite a lot of food was left over. Buckley, who had planned to cycle back to Stockport to start prepping a meal for his daughter and her friends that were coming over, decided he’d eat with us instead. 

The other people at the table, all food writers, swapped industry gossip and brought Buckley up to speed on who’s opening what. They also praised him and the pop-up, and it was evident that Buckley was with his people, drinking sparkling wine and eating big radicchio leaves, goats cheese and bits of blood orange. At one point I pick up a plate of beef meatballs and he tips his head towards them, “same family as Maraschino.”

If there is a place for Buckley’s ideas, and his way of communicating them, it will need to be somewhere like that: where eager listeners come to him, rather than him going to them. And that can only be Where The Light Gets In. Or, to put it another way, where the real world keeps out.