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Home Restaurant – A restaurant with a social purpose
We offer a unique dining experience serving Scottish/French cuisine for excellent value in the West End of Edinburgh.
Our customers can pay meals forward for the homeless, and we offer training and employment opportunities for Edinburgh’s most disadvantaged people.
Social Bite – A Sandwich shop with a difference
Social Bite (131 Rose Street, Edinburgh) | The List
food
Breakfast and lunch with a difference, serving sandwiches, hot food or coffee and cake to support good causes.
Social enterprise Social Bite has been working to help tackle homelessness and social problems since 2011.
In a handy city centre spot, the café offers a range of sandwiches, salads, soup and hot lunches as well as breakfast rolls and cakes.
The chicken, pesto and mozzarella sandwich is fresh and punchy, while a lentil soup is spicy and warming, one of several vegan and veggie items available.
The social enterprise is focused on more than handouts, helping people off the streets with profits going to good causes, a training academy and regular ‘social supper’ evenings offering access to services and advice.
Top chef Martin Wishart to help launch new Social Bite restaurant to ...
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Home is the latest venture by the team behind Social Bite – the successful chain of sandwich shops which allow customers to “pay a coffee forward” and invest profits to help vulnerable people get back on their feet.
It will provide training and employment programmes for members of the Social Bite Academy – the charity’s four-year course for homeless people – and the restaurant will open for a special service for the homeless every Monday afternoon.
Social Bite currently has two sandwich shops in Edinburgh – in Rose Street and Shandwick Place.
Clooney paid a visit to Social Bite’s branch in Rose Street last year and launched an appeal to help homeless people and fund an aid convoy carrying food and clothing to refugee camps across Europe.
Fans lined Rose Street to welcome Clooney, who took time to chat to the crowd and posed for selfies with Social Bite staff before speaking at the Scottish Business Awards.
Edinburgh restaurants
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Address: 60 North Castle Street, EH2 3LJ Getting there: bus to Princes Street (multiple services); tram to Princes Street stop Contact: 0131 226 1155; markgreenaway.com Opening times: Tue-Sat, midday-2.30pm, 5.30pm-10pm Price: lunch or dinner around £50; three course market menu lunch and early evening £26 Payment type: credit cards accepted Reservations: recommended Cuisine: Scottish, French London’s Galvin brothers came north to rehabilitate the stuffiest dining room in Edinburgh at the Waldorf Astoria Edinburgh – The Caledonian, lovingly restoring this painted and powdered confection of a dining room.
Address: The Caledonian, Princes Street, EH1 2AB Getting there: bus to Princes Street (multiple services); tram to West End - Princes Street stop Contact: 0131 222 8975; galvinrestaurants.com Opening times: Wed-Sun, Price: seven-course gourmand £75 Payment type: credit cards accepted Reservations: recommended Cuisine: French Of James Thomson’s wildly romantic triumvirate of Edinburgh restaurants (the others are The Witchery by the Castle and Rhubarb at Prestonfield), The Tower is the most decoratively subdued.
Social entrepreneur Josh Littlejohn: 'I want to build a utopia for the ...
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I’d actually read the article earlier: Hart, then 22, used to sell the Big Issue outside Social Bite; staff would sometimes give him unsold sandwiches at the end of the day and after a few weeks, Hart asked for a job.
Eventually, after a handful of these peer-referenced hires worked out, Littlejohn and Thompson determined that a quarter of Social Bite employees would come from homeless backgrounds.
Social Bite won Outstanding Achievement at the 2016 Observer Food Monthly awards, and Jamie Oliver was at the head of a line of luminaries on the night to congratulate Littlejohn – he and Thompson have now split, but she remains on the board of Social Bite and is manager of their canteen in the Rockstar Games Edinburgh head office.
Back at Social Bite, I ask Hart if he’s heard about Littlejohn’s village plan.
A Social Bite employee found Avery’s website, Tiny House Scotland, and forwarded it to Littlejohn.