FLOWER FOOD

Diners and drinkers are coming round to the use of edible blooms for their visual appeal, flavours and textures.

e still see people picking the flower out of their drink as though it isn’t meant to be there,” chuckles Greg Almeida, the bartender at Scarfe’s Bar at Rosewood Hotel in London.

“But people are starting to understand that they can eat it - at least once they’ve been told they can.” Indeed, flowers have long been used as decoration on restaurant dishes, and latterly in cocktails.

“Edible flowers have a high impact,” says Almeida, who trained as a chef before moving into mixology. “They’re delicate, colourful, have interesting forms. But for many using them in food and drink, the important thing is that they bring distinctive flavours. Most chefs wouldn’t just use a flower because it’s pretty. The fact is that there are so many plants to experiment with, so it feels like a new field.”

It’s not, of course: flowers have been eaten for centuries - crystallised, distilled, used to add sweetness to tarts before sugar became accessible, made into jams and, perhaps above all, used as a garnish.

The aesthetic appeal of flowers has been key to Asian cuisines in particular - crushed rose petals to create a pastry filling in Chinese cooking, for example, salt-pickled blossoms to cook with rice in Japanese cooking. Rose and orange blossoms are big in Middle Eastern cuisines. Saffron - the most expensive spice in the world - comes, of course, from the red stigmas of the crocus flower. Michelin cooking rediscovered flower food in the 1980s.

But now edible flowers have become part of the wider foodie movement towards eating whatever is seasonal - with the fashion for foraging also a factor - and found a new home on Michelin-starred plates.

At the Skye restaurant at The Park Lane Hong Kong, there’s a rooftop garden where herbs but also flowers are grown to be used in the dishes,

“Most chefs wouldn’t

just use a flower because it’s pretty.”