The fading art of elegant gallery dining

We live in times generally unfriendly to ritual, religious or civic. For 50 years at least, churches have stripped away once-glorious liturgical rituals in order, they say, to render themselves more accessible, even as pews have emptied. On the civic side, great art museums – some would say the cathedrals of our secular age – once invited visitors to a ritual that gave a rest to the feet and the eyes while enhancing the experience of being there in the first place. It was called having lunch.

Visual attentiveness requires energy even if, like me, you shy away from reading the labels. Energy requires calories. This may be why, circumstances permitting, I am a morning museum-goer. A good breakfast behind me, I like to be there when the doors open, at the pitch of alertness in anticipation of revisiting or seeing afresh portraits, peeled lemons, skies and landscapes and all the rest. I am there when the guard unlocks the gates also in anticipation of lunch before me. Call it a reward, a respite, a ritual.

Lunch, as we all know, is a meal that has fared poorly in our hyper-casualised culture. Back when I was fully in the swing of things and working in a big city, an hour or more midday repast out of the office was not frowned upon. Nor was having a beer to wash it down. The same habit applied when visiting a great museum. Grab-and-go describes an opposite approach: of feeding, not dining, as if all we needed was fuel for the machine and no respite at all.

You won’t go hungry come lunchtime at any of the renowned galleries. You may however encounter some variety in what is on offer along the casual-to-formal spectrum, with the preponderance falling heavily toward the casual end.