Investors in the Environment (iiE) member Sundays opened its independent restaurant in Peterborough in 2004 and has continued to thrive, offering a high standard of locally-sourced produce, including traditional roast dinners and now its new ‘BBQ Nights’. David Beever from Sundays explains why sustainability matters to him:
Why is it important to serve your own home-raised meats to your customers?
I believe that grass-fed, home-raised animals should be standard practice. More people are finally thinking about what they are putting on their plate and where it comes from. So naturally, we get a lot of customers that like buying our Sunday dinners because they know the effort and ethics that have gone into their ‘quality’ dinner!
What does ‘farm to fork’ mean for you?
Growing up on a farm, it didn't even occur to me to source vegetables, eggs and meat from anywhere else than directly from farms. We primarily use smallholders for our vegetables and eggs, and for meat some beef from our own herd and then the majority from Gary Simpsons butchers (2016 Butcher of the year). Any business can buy cheap cuts of meat from unknown sources, but we don’t want that here at Sundays! 90% of our ingredients are sourced from within a one-hour round trip from the restaurant, and we try and keep everything ethically sourced and local! We have even won awards for our green and sustainable practices too.
What awards are these?
We have achieved the Investors in the Environment (iiE) top level Green award for the last four years. We even won a ‘Great Green Star’ with them too! iiE is an evidence-based accreditation scheme that’s a great endorsement of the practices we had in place anyway. Being green shouldn't necessarily be a 'thing', it really should be just the way we live our lives and conduct business. It should be normal to have as little waste as possible, it should be normal to use locally grown and sustainable food: simple principles that make sense economically too.
What inspired you to launch BBQ Nights?
We felt the opportunity to open at night was there and we wanted to give Peterborough something different. ‘BBQ Nights’ is unique to the city. We have an award-winning smoker from Cookshack in Oklahoma. It really is a magic box! I'd spent a month travelling in the states in 2009 and ate some fantastic BBQ food and had always thought that when properly done it was food that would work well in England! I wanted to combine the great taste with our ethics to create something really special.
Sundays Restaurant is offering iiE members a 2-4-1 voucher on all food (breakfast, roast dinners, meat rolls, and BBQ Nights meals. Simply let Sundays know you are an ‘iiE member’ in-store and show the link to this blog to claim your offer. Valid until 3 March 2017.
To contact Sundays or to book a table, please call 01733 554334 or visit 3 Cumbergate, Peterborough PE1 1YR. For more on the original story from Moment magazine, click here.