Food For Thought

The museum restaurant, a place where once children dreamed of having a Faraday fudge Sundae or a tyrannosaurus Mex burger, now a place of limp pre-packed sandwiches, stewed tea and coffee the colour of dish water. Or is it?

With the recent growth of the stay at home holiday could the museum restaurant be on the rise?

With a recent trip to the Wallace collection, London, I got to thinking about the symbiotic relationship between the museum caterer and the museum itself. Can a restaurant add to a museum? Can a restaurant promote and gain an audience that otherwise might ignore the museums collection altogether? Can a restaurant provide a feeling of ownership and understanding of a collection which is in the nations hands? And can a museum use a restaurant to it's advantage without risks of expenditure?

Ask "who has heard of the Wallace collection?" outside of a set of friends, with whom one would be most disappointed, not many. It's a small national collection in Manchester Square housed in Hertford house. It has some of the best preserved porcelain on show, some fantastic armour, and paintings and furniture to rival any where in the world. Ask "who has seen the great British menu?" and I would suspect a lot more. It has national TV coverage, appeals to a nation that seems to be excessively drawn to cooking programs and contains a panel of three judges, one of whom, Oliver Peyton, is in the centre of the Wallace collection. Literally.

Within the central courtyard of Hertford house lay the Oliver Peyton restaurant, at the top of a google search for the Wallace collection you see table reservations for the restaurant, and as you walk through the collection you see the restaurant, busy, alive, creating an atmosphere of life within a house which, without it, might seem a little lifeless, and the restaurant reviews make sure people know where it is.

Can we learn from this? The Leeds museum has a fine cafe, it might even be more engaging than the museum itself for some adults, the tiled hall has had a fantastic influence upon the visitor numbers for the Leeds art gallery, the terrace at Harewood house gives a feeling of watching a shooting party returning across the grounds in halcyon edwardian days, and there by creating a slightly better understanding of the house, it's architecture and the upper classes. And the royal armouries? Well... not so great.

In the examples of the Wallace collection, the Leeds museums and galleries and Harewood house, rent is paid to the collections, the restaurants draw in a number of visitors who otherwise might pass on by and, in some cases, might allow the public to feel closer to understanding certain collections. All this with little or no risk on the behalf of the museum or collection who are always, especially in the current economic climate, in need of cold hard cash. The royal armouries on the other hand, has no such symbiosis with their cafe. Built as an example of how government and private enterprise could work together it has failed.

The building which houses the national collection is owned by a catering company, so no rent for the armouries, the private company has the rights to hold large functions within the building, using the exhibits as a draw, so no money for the beleaguered armouries, and the armouries has no control of opening times, which leads to complaints about the museum, and the armouries cannot provide catering so no historical food to tie in with joust weekend, or campaign food from the peninsular war. And the food? Yep! Limp sandwiches and cold chips are the house speciality.

So if we treat the museum and restaurant relationship with respect it can bring great rewards for both parties, free advertising, increased visitor numbers, greater income and greater interaction between visitor and collection, a relationship greater than the sum of its parts. And if we get it wrong? Well let's just not! Food for thought......

Now where did I put that Gauguintuan burger?