An Ace Caff, With Quite a Nice Museum Attached*
Or, going back to food and museums
Photo © Eithne Owens
I closed out 2024 with a film review and am opening 2025 with a restaurant review. No, I haven’t got tired of museums (although you can read the piece I wrote about my museum-related existential crisis here) but I have been thinking about revisiting the topic of my MA dissertation … looking at the role that ancillary services, especially cafes, play in the museum visitor experience.
Flash back briefly to 2002 (!) when I got a job at the café in the Chester Beatty Library to earn some money while I was doing my MA. Food had long been an interest (as a teenager I used to read cookbooks for fun … Delia Smith, Elizabeth David, Anne Willan) and although I had abandoned any plans to make it a career, I loved working in food services. (Genuinely. I like feeding people.) I loved the Silk Road Café at the Chester Beatty when I first ate there (fantastic Middle Eastern food that was then in scarce supply in Dublin) and more or less blagged my way into a job (at the time I was doing substitute teaching so perhaps my new boss could sense my desperation?)
Anyway, as I served portions of moussaka, falafel, kofta and baklava to visitors, this is what I noticed. People loved being in a museum of Middle Eastern art and having their experience extended in the café. They loved having multiple encounters with a new culture, but through a medium they found more approachable (ie their tummies). And they often found it easier to ask me, the person serving their food, questions about the museum than the ‘official’ museum staff outside the café.
So I took these observations and turned them into a dissertation. My quantitative research (which has given me an abiding respect for anyone asking for audience feedback in museums) basically confirmed my observations. People see the museum as a whole: all of the elements (toilets, shop, café, galleries) feed into the total experience and therefore have a role in overall satisfaction. A great café, moreover one that supports the themes of the museum, can have a big impact on what visitors takeaway.
Flash forward to last summer, when I was thinking about sources of inspiration and realised that food still feeds (sorry about the pun) my creative process. Whether it’s cooking, eating with family and friends, going to cookbook club (yes, still reading them for pleasure), or eating out, I think there are many aspects of food and food culture that inform how I think about museums. This was very clear when I inadvertently wrote a mini review of Delia’s restaurant at Norwich City Football Club at the end of my post about the Sainsbury Centre.
All of this to say, I’m planning to reflect and write more in 2025 on food and museums. Because what I am pondering is … why do more museums NOT use food as a point of connection with visitors? I’m sure some of this relates to operations and finance. Some of it to what the market can afford. Sometimes there are very good reasons to have the most functional café possible. But I still think a great café can be a game changer for the museum experience.
Which brings me almost up to date, with a visit to the Garden Museum in December. I love this museum, I love its permanent exhibition about the importance of gardens in British culture and the evolution of garden design, I love its temporary exhibitions and I love, love, love the café. Now, you could say that, on the face of it, this isn’t a particularly garden-themed restaurant. I would counter that the design of the cafe with its floor to ceiling windows overlooking the outside space, the overall ambience, and the emphasis on seasonal produce are a subtle but clear nod to the themes of the museum. I also agree with Jay Rayner, who, in his review of the café, said, ‘If there is a style of cooking that can be defined as London, and increasingly I think there is, it lies in the sum of these various parts.’
For someone who loves food so much, I think I’d make a terrible restaurant reviewer since mostly greed overcomes me at the expense of considered descriptions of the ingredients. But I did actually make a note of what I had for lunch in December. To start, some mulled cider (delicious, spicy, seasonal) and then the winter chanterelles with pearl barley and charred leeks … which was somehow exactly what I felt like eating on a miserably dark winter’s day. And then I hoovered up a choux bun with malt ice cream, caramel and praline which was a joyful combination of sweet and salty, warm and cold.
Afterwards, my friends and I wandered the exhibition feeling full and mellow and discussing gardens, life and museums.
The Garden Museum café would not work in every museum. In fact, I’m not sure it would work anywhere except where it is. And maybe that is the key: for a a café to be a true extension of the content, it has to be as idiosyncratic as the museum it serves. Which is why the numerous franchises that proliferate in London’s museums will never be anything more than fine, forgettable. Look, I know that making a café or restaurant pay at the moment (especially in London) is an uphill struggle, and so this model is not going to be available for every museum, but I still wonder why we are willing to accept the bland and the mediocre.
There’s a lot of pearl clutching about museum cafes, but as the examples I link to below show, many of the arguments just get recycled … the coffee is HOW much? Why do we clutter up our art with cafes? Why do we debase our museums with commercial enterprises? Even when the restaurants are reviewed or written about, it’s often in an ironic, tongue in cheek way.
But if we’re thinking about reducing barriers to access, we should be thinking about how food can play a part in this. We should be thinking seriously about how the food experience can inform and be informed by the gallery experience. We should be thinking about how we can make the museum café benefit the workings and live the values of the museum … culturally, financially and socially.
So I’m planning to explore some unusual, excellent and left-field examples in the coming weeks and see what comes out of the exploration. And why, if that means I have to eat at more museum cafes then that’s a price I’m willing to pay.
Food for Thought
The ‘Ace caff’ line is, of course, a reference to the famous / infamous V&A ad campaign from the 1980s.
This Spectator piece about museum cafes gives a good recap of attitudes and mentions my beloved Modern Art Desserts.
Apollo Magazine starts doing museum restaurant reviews.