We commented on the increasing prevalence of designer restaurants in the cultural sector in our previous post on the transformation of museum spaces. That said, we thought this topic merited a post of its own.
While not entirely new, we think the pop-up art restaurant might just well be one of the next big things to hit our world. The Times ran a feature recently on the success of niche retailers such as notonthehighstreet.com which was reflective both of the resistance to the ‘clone high street’ and identified the value that can be derived from specialising for consumers. Our previous post on culture retail commented on the emergence of creative new merchandises drawing inspiration from core assets such as the collection and the specialism of institutions. Catering could also provide fertile ground for similar approaches.
From retail to food
The pop-up store is familiar to both the retail and art worlds with Santa’s Ghetto, run by Pictures on Walls (who distribute work by artists including Banksy) a notable success with a crowd pulling temporary store each Christmas on Oxford Street.
GSK Contemporary, the new contemporary art season being launched at the Royal Academy in October provides one such example of how the concept has transferred to the business of food. The exhibition incorporates Flash, a culinary experience that is a combination of art and food created by London restaurateurs’, Bistrotheque. They were the people behind Reindeer, the acclaimed ‘guerrilla Christmas restaurant’ at Truman Brewery a couple of years ago, that sold out for its 23-day run. Flash will be sited at the Royal Academy’s home in a temporary space designed by the architect David Kohn Architects. Billed as ‘a restaurant like no other; FLASH will be a room within a room, an installation within an exhibition’ and will blur the boundaries between gallery and visitor service spaces. Even the crockery is an art product, the result of a partnership between Wedgewood and the illustrator Will Broome, and of course will be on sale in the shop afterwards!
This may seem a concept more suited to the capital but the mushrooming of Michelin Star restaurants in locations as diverse as Cornwall and Ludlow, alongside the growth of art hotels nationwide means this could prove to be a highly transferable concept across the UK.
Of course, for those who want to push it to the extreme, perhaps the restaurant will become the art. See Prada Marfa by the artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset… literally an installation of a Prada store in a remote Texan desert town of Marfa, USA!
