You art what you eat: Tate Modern's Andy Warhol menu and the galleries perfecting the art of eating

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Ailis Brennan11 March 2020

Andy Warhol's prints are a kind of precursor of the Insta foodsnap: he painted what he ate, putting his diet down on the canvas — Campbell’s soup, Coca-Cola, Corn Flakes. Not that he cared for food. “When I order in a restaurant,” he once wrote, “I order everything that I don’t want so I have a lot to play around with while everyone else eats.”

Warhol’s disdain for dining makes him an unlikely source of inspiration for what’s happening at Tate Modern. Alongside the retrospective of his work opening tomorrow, the gallery’s restaurant is offering an eight-course menu in honour of the artist. “He felt a big social pressure to look like he was eating,” says head chef Jon Atashroo, “but he would still order stuff that sounded good — caviar, tuna, pâté.”

Warhol liked food best when it indulged his imagination; his deliciously dark 1963 piece Tunafish Disaster is one such work Atashroo has reimagined. “The original artwork was inspired by two ladies that passed away after eating a tainted can of tuna,” he says. “That made me think, ‘What if we use tinned tuna in a dressing and showed the ‘disaster’ as some kind of paint splat?’”

The resulting dish features slices of seared, fresh tuna spattered with mayonnaise, red pepper and chives. Elsewhere, bacon ice cream is topped with pieces of maple-candied meat — a homage to Warhol’s penchant for the phrase “bringing home the bacon” — and is served with a cream of tomato sauce akin to the contents of the famous Campbell cans. “It took a while to get the balance right,” says Atashroo, who sweetens his sauce with strawberries. “I originally tried doing it with tinned tomato soup but it was nasty.”

Tunafish Disaster: A dish inspired by one of Warhol's darker works 

The tasting menu mixes the low-brow preferences of Warhol’s palate — the Coca-Cola has made it into a jelly, while cornflakes flavour a panna cotta — with those of the well-heeled circles he mixed with. Crackers topped with caviar nod to Warhol’s nights partying with the Iranian Shah, where he observed that portions of the delicacy dwindled as the regime came closer to collapse.

Mr Atashroo has found the few foods Warhol actually enjoyed, though. “I think he would have smashed the desserts,” he says. Warhol’s sweet tooth is well fed, especially by a version of his most famous culinary quirk, a kind of sandwich he called “cake”.

“When he was a poor child of immigrant parents, one of the things they had as a treat was a chocolate bar between two slices of bread,” says Atashroo, who repurposes the peculiar recipe as pieces of custard-dipped brioche wrapped around a Mars bar, baked and served with caramelised banana. “It’s so dirtily good.”

The Warhol menu comes just as food and art seem bound closer than ever. Forget stale scones in dingy tea rooms, London art institutions are increasingly looking to the food world for sustenance.

Down the Mall: Radishes with smoked cod's roe at Rochelle Canteen at the ICA 

Whitechapel Gallery recently welcomed Townsend, a project by Anglo’s Nick Gilkinson and ex-Petersham Nurseries head chef Joe Fox, serving seasonal British dishes such as sprightly Yorkshire rhubarb with pear sorbet. At high-end auction house Bonhams, elegant Italian dining room Emilia comes from the team behind The Quality Chop House, who have swapped meaty cuts for cockle tagliatelle.

The influence runs both ways. At Somerset House, where top chef Bryn Williams and Skye Gyngell both have restaurants, next week resident curator Tabitha Thorlu-Bangura hosts a supper in underground space the Deadhouse. Birth, marriage and death will all be pondered using both taste and sound, meaning the food itself is part of the art. River Café’s Hannah Hammond cooks.

Stoke Newington’s Shamiyaana offers something similar in spirit. Artist Rasheed Araeen “has transformed a restaurant into an artwork” — certainly, it has all the colour of an artist’s palette but it goes beyond that: “It is a testament to Araeen’s belief in the untapped power of collective action,” says the website, “as well as his concerns with climate change, food production, sustainability and ecology”.

Andy Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern

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The outpost of Margot Henderson and Melanie Arnold's Rochelle Canteen in the ICA has thrown itself into the art world too: down from the dining room is an installation from artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, though it happens to be a fully functioning sake bar. Henderson’s long-time chum St. John founder John Spiteri will open Sessions Arts Club in Clerkenwell this month, where a 60-cover restaurant will also host art, music and theatre events.

Meanwhile, those with a thirst for more after guzzling cocktails at Hackney Wick’s Number 90 can visit its Number Gallery, where pieces sell from £50 up into the thousands.

“I don't know if it starts getting a bit wanky,” says Atashroo, “but by tying the exhibitions into what we're doing at the restaurant, and it becomes part of an experience.”

It may not be Warhol’s Factory floor, but the art of dining is a movement of its own.

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