I wanted a healthy lunch that was easy to prepare at my desk, because the usual options were bland, expensive or unhealthy. So I started eating salads in the office.
My colleagues seemed to love my salads and kept wanting to tuck in,
even the junk food fans and the heavy meat eaters, so I began photographing them and posting them on a blog. I made a new salad every single day for four years as a challenge on my blog.
About David Bez
Hello, my name is David Bez, and I’m not a chef. I’m an Italian food lover from Milan who moved to London in 2008 and worked as Art Director and Graphic Designer since 2014, then for many more years as freelance. I started eating salads at my desk to survive lunch, and it turned into four cookbooks, a café, a restaurant and a range of plant-based products. Today I develop food for brands and write about plant-based cooking.
As seen in The Times, The Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, the Daily Mail, The Huffington Post and Stylist.
The SaladPride Blog (since 2010)
It’s easy to get bored doing the same thing over and over again, but I’m always curious about new ingredients and flavours. I used my lunch break to explore new possibilities, mixing and matching tastes, and people all over the world started following along.
Salad Love (2014)
Salad Love: How to Create a Lunchtime Salad, Every Weekday, in 20 Minutes or Less
The blog became my first book. The Daily Mail called me “the man who sexed up salad”, and Salad Love has been translated into more than 26 languages. It’s built on a simple formula: a base, a vegetable or fruit, fresh herbs, a protein topping and a dressing, so you never need a rigid recipe and you never get bored.
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Breakfast Love (2016)
Breakfast Love: Perfect Little Bowls for Quick, Healthy Breakfasts
I’m Italian, so as a child breakfast was milk and biscuits, and I never found a healthy breakfast I really liked. So I applied the Salad Love formula to the first meal of the day. Breakfast Love has more than 150 bowls for every season and every palate, each built from two fruits or vegetables, a cereal, a protein, a liquid such as yoghurt or milk, and perhaps an extra topping such as fresh herbs, plus recipes to make your own granola, muesli and dairy-free nut ‘yoghurt’.
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Supper Love (2017)
My third book is 130 bowls for supper in any season and for every appetite, from light, raw and fresh to hot, filling and wholesome. Every recipe is ultra simple and can be adapted to suit a different diet, such as vegan or vegetarian, and the book includes the basics for fermenting, dressings, broths and hummus.
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Why I went plant-based
It wasn’t a trend for me, it was a real calling.
While making my third book Supper Love, I found I felt sick cooking meat, and I realised my body was refusing it.
At the same time I watched a lot of documentaries about animal farming that made me sure I didn’t want to be part of it. I feel for the animals and for the consequences of animal farming on the planet.
SaladPride @ Neal's Yard Cafe in Seven Dials (2016-2017)
I’d been dreaming of a cafe that reflected my philosophy of natural, simple, good-looking food that has a big impact on your health and well-being and is also fair, sustainable and local.
So I gave up my 15-year career in graphic design and, with the help of a successful crowdfunding campaign, decided to create my dream cafe.
In March 2016 SaladPride Cafe at Neal's Yard opened.
For two years we served tasty, supercharging soups, salads and breakfasts, fresh juices, smoothies and cakes, all gluten-free, dairy-free and refined-sugar-free (yes, it’s possible!), championing fruit and veg and local, sustainable artisans and farmers.
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Plant Hub / Hackney (2019-20)
In 2019, together with Lauren Lovatt and Antonino Alderuccio, I co-founded Plant Hub in Hackney: a space to research plant-based food excellence while serving plant-based comfort food. We used local and seasonal ingredients and supported local farmers such as Wild Country Organics and The Wild Room, and local producers such as IAMNUTOK, Hackney Gelato, Hodmedods and Hackney Herbal. It was also an academy, with classes in things like vegetable life drawing and food styling.
I left in December 2020 to go back to writing and food development, and the restaurant carried on without me.
I left in December 2020 to go back to writing and food development, and the restaurant carried on without me.
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Vegan Love (2022)
Britain’s supermarkets have recently been flooded with cheap, highly refined, very unnatural vegan replacements for meat and cheese. That’s fine if you just want to swap old habits for new ones, but a lot of vegans are realising those replacements are processed and not very healthy.
My fourth book takes a different approach: bring big veggies to the next level and, together with pulses, show how simple it can be. Each recipe has a big veg as the star, plus a protein, a sauce and a topping, and many take 30 minutes or less. Anna Jones called it “brave, bold cooking that puts whole vegetables at the centre of your plate.”
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