SUMMARY

VENN is a 26-seat plant-based tasting menu restaurant in Porto's Baixa, founded by Snider Rodrigues, Monika Błoch and Julian Fernandes. The kitchen, led by chef Monika, works from a small network of regenerative farms and producers across Portugal. Every dish traces back to a farm, a season, and a clear set of choices about sourcing, technique and waste. For guests, the value proposition is a distinctive seasonal menu rooted in Portuguese biodiversity, recognised by national and international press. For the sector, it is the demonstration that a restaurant can operate without the extractive defaults that shape most of the industry. Adjacent projects such as EAT.BITZ extend this work into research and public programming, often in partnership with local social and European innovation programmes.

PROBLEM

The restaurant industry is one of the most extractive sectors of the modern economy. Most kitchens depend on long, opaque supply chains, on commodity ingredients chosen for price rather than provenance, and on a culture that treats waste as a cost of doing business. Animal-heavy menus drive disproportionate environmental impact. Small regenerative producers struggle to access stable restaurant accounts. Diners rarely know where their food came from or what choices it represents.

The result is an industry that quietly accelerates biodiversity loss, soil degradation and food-system emissions, even as individual restaurants market themselves as local and sustainable. VENN is built around a specific question: can a small, financially viable restaurant operate without these defaults, and can the model it tests be useful to others working to change the sector?

SOLUTION

VENN's solution operates on two layers. The first is the restaurant: a kitchen built on direct sourcing from regenerative farms across Portugal, a 100% plant-based menu that works without imitating animal products, whole-vegetable low-waste technique, and a service culture that surfaces the sourcing context of each dish.

The second is PATIO, VENN's living platform that turns the restaurant into a real-world testbed for biodiversity, circularity and social inclusion in the urban food system. PATIO runs across three sub-layers: a physical intervention turning the restaurant's outdoor space into a site for ecological restoration; EAT.BITZ, a digital biodiversity layer connecting diners to the farms behind each menu; and a social programme exploring how a restaurant can be a more inclusive public space. The impact is threefold: stable accounts for small regenerative producers, a working fully plant-based fine dining model, and a reference for operators, researchers and food-system actors thinking about how the restaurant industry can change.