Eating insects? It's just not cricket

While it may look like any other restaurant on the outside, London's Yum Bug, as the name suggests, offers a rather unusual culinary experience for the British capital. It calls itself "the world's first bug-based small plates restaurant." 

The Yum Bug company, which makes edible insect products, opened its permanent eatery in February with the goal of shifting perceptions of eating insects. 

"We are actually the world's first bug-based small plates restaurant," Leo Taylor, Yum Bug's co-founder declared. "Everything from the butter to the desserts contains insects, and obviously, all the meat ingredients are crickets. People are often quite surprised at how meaty insects are, but they are meat. We're not having to do much wizardry to keep it very meaty."

He added: "The whole challenge around insects in the West is this cultural barrier," saying that the restaurant aims to give people a "good first experience" of eating bugs.

Yum Bug ran a pop-up version of the restaurant at a different location in October 2023 before opening this permanent site in February 2024 in Finsbury Park, North London. 

The company was founded by Leo Taylor and Aaron Thomas in 2018 and during the Covid-19 pandemic they sold insect meal kits.

Yum Bug's crickets are farmed in Cambridgeshire and, according to the company, contain 50 percent more protein than supermarket beef while producing 15 times less carbon dioxide to produce per kilogram of protein.

The edible insect industry is a growing sector, expected to grow by almost 50 percent between 2023 and 2032, according to the Global Market Insights research and consulting group. 

Insects are widely seen as an option for climate-friendly food production (for use in animal feed and human consumption), as farming insects takes less space, causes less deforestation and emissions than livestock. 

Customers seem to like the cricket-munching experience. According to Miguel Galindo, dining with his partner: "We almost tried the whole menu. We tried the burrata, we tried the pulled pork tacos...the pulled cricket tacos, the broccoli, It was really nice. Particularly the kebab one. It was quite tasty... quite filling."

Zena Kamgaing added: "It doesn't feel like you're eating cricket. It feels like you're just eating... like a mix between meat and a mushroom, it's like somewhere in between the two and it's a really good texture."

Many cultures around the world have traditionally eaten insects.

The Yum Bug restaurant menu features dishes from several countries/cuisines and includes crickets in a range of forms.

According to Taylor: "What's really important to us is we showcase this as an ingredient that's versatile, that you can cook into all sorts of dishes. We've got Mexican dishes, we've got tacos, we've got burrata, Italian stuff, we've got pasta, we've just got a new cricket lasagna on the menu today, we've got Middle Eastern. All of these cultures cook and eat insects to some degree and we want to showcase it in these different formats."

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