London’s top restaurants donate recipes to virtual cookbook the Pass

The Pass, a new fundraising initiative and online platform with recipes donated from more than 40 of London’s top restaurants and chefs has been launched.

The Pass was created in three weeks during lockdown by a group of home cooks wanting to support the restaurant industry. It includes recipes for signature dishes from restaurants including Dishoom, Quo Vadis, Barrafina, Patty & Bun, Kricket, Lina Stores and Tom Aikens.

The “ever-evolving” virtual cookbook is freely available and readers are encouraged to make a donation to Hospitality Action. Aikens said: “The hospitality industry is having a particularly hard time right now and lots of people are struggling to make ends meet.

"Not only is the Pass supporting a fantastic cause, it’s also a great way to get behind the scenes inside a professional kitchen – from discovering unpublished recipes from some of the best chefs and restaurants around to amazing ingredients from trusted suppliers.”

As well as recipes, the platform highlights restaurant initiatives such as recipe boxes or hot food delivery and divulges the secrets behind the chefs’ well-known dishes, including Pastaio’s carbonara (pictured), Bubala’s halloumi with black seed honey and Pophams’ maple and bacon Danish.

Alex Lazare, founder of the Pass, said that the initiative was a solution to raising money for an industry that had given him so much, while allowing him to continue to eat the food he craved from the places he loved.

He added: “Longer term, our sector needs innovative solutions to support restaurants’ new off-floor initiatives, and we want to make the Pass the platform that facilitates that”.