Meat-free cooking has come a long way in the last 61 years. Just ask Barrie Henderson, who has seen his family name become synonymous with vegetarian dining in Edinburgh. Barrie wasn’t even born when his grandmother, Janet, blazed a trail back in 1962, but today he continues her veg-loving legacy. The menu is now largely vegan too, cementing the restaurant’s place as a beacon of plant-led cooking.
“Janet was a pioneer in recognising the importance of fruit and vegetables for our health and wellbeing, and that tradition carries on here to this day,” says Barrie. “There are actually omnivore regulars who enjoy our imaginative dishes and forget there’s no meat on the menu!” This speaks to the evolution of meatless dining in the decades since the restaurant opened: great vegetarian and vegan cooking is simply great cooking.
At Hendersons, that’s in part down to how wholeheartedly the chefs embrace fruit and veg. Much of the conversation around vegan dining is focused on ‘meat substitutes’, often eliciting sneers from carnivorous folk. Barrie and the team prefer to go back to basics. “We steer clear of ultra-processed foods and the incumbent preservatives, processes and additives therein, as that’s most definitely contrary to our ethos,” he argues. “There’s so many delicious, unadulterated options out there: inspiring, colourful and nourishing ingredients and superfoods that humans have been consuming for thousands of years.”
It’s an approach that Janet would surely have been proud of. Continuing her health-conscious ideas, the restaurant has ‘Eat Better, Live Better’ as its tagline, something supported by the natural, low-intervention approach to cooking. Whether it’s salt-baked celeriac, beetroot carpaccio or chermoula aubergine, vegetables are always leading the way on the menu – just like they used to.
A few things have changed since Janet’s heyday, of course, not least a post-pandemic relocation to Bruntsfield Links. Prior to the sad closure of their Hanover Street premises, Hendersons was the UK’s longest-running vegetarian restaurant. The concept and the ethos that made it a success for so long has been continued after the hiatus, albeit with some tweaks to the team’s approach. “The original diner was in a basement with predominantly counter service,” Barrie explains. “Now we enjoy big windows and have table service. We even have a small kitchen garden.”
The garden is something of a passion project for Barrie, who has strived to make the restaurant more and more sustainable as time goes on. Food waste is composted and used to grow herbs, fruit and edible flowers for dishes, while the closure of the original business presented the perfect opportunity to rethink their processes and make everything more energy efficient. This is indicative of the move as a whole, with Barrie and the team carefully blending tradition and progress.
“Our reincarnation gave us a freedom to bring back the best of the old whilst making many improvements,” he says. When the closure happened, some older family members took the opportunity to retire, leaving Barrie to re-launch a business he had been working in from the age of 14. Many exciting new dishes have landed since then, but some of the old favourites remain, including their famous vegan haggis.
“We now serve it with a whisky tarragon cream sauce, caramelised red onions and micro herbs, and sometimes nasturtium flowers from our garden,” Barrie tells us. “It’s definitely an updated version but retains the original haggis recipe, using natural ingredients for a healthy vegan reinterpretation of Scotland’s national dish.” Appropriately enough that original recipe was Janet’s own – a lovely reminder of the vision that started it all.
“I like to think she would be pleased,” Barrie suggests. “I only wish I’d met her. She was way ahead of her time; in any business you have to constantly be on your toes.” His admiration for his grandmother is clear, and the Henderson family both old and new continues to be a driving force in Barrie’s work: “I have a strong belief in being a custodian of Hendersons, in looking after and providing for the team, preserving the company for the next generation of staff and family members to come.”
