Australian designer Joost Bakker will launch his first overseas Greenhouse restaurant in London, UK next year.

The sustainable restaurant concept first opened in Perth in 2009 and has gathered momentum following a pop-up restaurant that operated for six weeks at Sydney's harbourside in March 2011.

As well as the UK launch, permanent sites are currently being planned for Sydney and Melbourne. The London restaurant is scheduled to open by mid-2012.

The Greenhouse concept is based on using produce sourced solely from biodynamic farms while the building itself has been built using the Productive Building Method (PBM) developed by Bakker. PBM uses recycled and recyclable materials with even the solid steel structure being 100 per cent recyclable.

The menu changes constantly, is dependent on available produce and includes a number of ecologically-friendly, organic solutions. One of these is using freshly milled wheat.

"If someone orders a pasta at midday, that dish will have been wheat at 11 o'clock," Bakker said. "You can't get faster than that from grain to plate."

Bakker adds that while the concept is highly sustainable, the price of dining will not come at a premium.

"I think people will be surprised at how affordable the Greenhouse is. Restaurants make sustainable food expensive, but it doesn't have to be if you work with the growers in the right way.

"If a farmer has a lot of cauliflowers one week, we'll come up with lots of different ways to serve it - the farmer can't run his business if all you want to buy from him is a half a box of cauliflowers."

To read the full interview with Joost Bakker, click here for Leisure Management issue 4 2011, p 46