Eat Out London!The Garden Cafe
The Garden Café offers a daily menu consisting of fresh and seasonal food, and a focus on simple ingredients.
Garden Café - Garden Museum
The Garden Café offers a daily menu consisting of fresh and seasonal food, with a focus on simple, quality ingredients.
Lunch is served from 12pm – 3pm daily (12pm – 2pm on Saturdays).
Due to the busy lunch period, the restaurant only serves meals from 12 – 3pm, but outside this time tea, coffee and fresh pastries are available.
Please note that the Garden Café cannot accommodate more than twelve guests in a group.
Reviews and related sites
The Garden Cafe review: a green-fingered treat | The Week Portfolio
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The museum occupies St Mary-at-Lambeth, a medieval church next to Lambeth Palace, the official residence of Bancroft and his ilk since the 13th century.
The second is his son, John Tradescant the younger, who didn’t fall far from the tree.
As head gardener to Charles I, he imported plants and trees from the American colonies and laid out the gardens of the Queen’s House in Greenwich.
In front is the Thames, on one side a courtyard garden containing the Tradescant tomb, and on the other a larger wedge of lawn and ornamental hedge.
Head chefs Harry Kaufman (formerly of Lyle’s and St John Bread & Wine) and George Ryle (of Padella and Primeur) have drawn inspiration from Italy and Scandinavia for their ever-changing collection of dishes.
Garden Café - Garden Museum
food
The Garden Café offers a daily menu consisting of fresh and seasonal food, with a focus on simple, quality ingredients.
Lunch is served from 12pm – 3pm daily (12pm – 2pm on Saturdays).
Due to the busy lunch period, the restaurant only serves meals from 12 – 3pm, but outside this time tea, coffee and fresh pastries are available.
Please note that the Garden Café cannot accommodate more than twelve guests in a group.
The Garden Café | A Seasonal Restaurant Hidden Within a Garden ...
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The garden in question is the newly refurbed Garden Museum (a de-consecrated and rescued church, complete with medieval tower and between two and five unexpected late Archbishops under the floor), and the addition is housed within a gloriously sleek glass and beaten bronze pavilion jutting out from it.
Taking inspiration from their natural environs, the menu’s a seasonally inspired affair, where dishes come in sumptuous portions you won’t want to share, packed with punchy flavours.
The dishes all evolve regularly, but you can expect the likes of trout served with turnip tops and pink fir potatoes; king cabbage, potato and paprika dumplings; and mallard with braised red cabbage for mains, bolstered by sides and starters of radicchio with candied walnuts; smoked cod’s roe with Jerusalem artichokes; and pork and pistachio terrine.
NOTE: The Garden Café is open Monday to Friday 8am–5pm, Saturday 9am–3.30pm and Sunday 9am–5pm.
The Garden Café | The Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Road, SE1 7LB Like combining dining and culture?
The Garden Café review: A leafy enclave to treasure in Lambeth ...
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Bronze-clad pavilions surround a new courtyard, boasting at its centre not only the mausoleums of Captain Bligh and the Tradescants (the pioneer plant collectors who inspired the museum) but also a Dan Pearson-designed garden, conceived as a botanical tribute.
Although the furnishings are stripped-wood Scandi modernist (one of the architects involved, Tom Benton, worked with the minimalist David Chipperfield), they are comfortable and generously spaced (54 covers) and the acoustic is good for talking — and the people who come to this café look like they have things to say worth hearing.
Burrata and marinated spinach on toast (£7.50) was, the other David observed, cheese on toast — but such good cheese (sourced from Mons in Dulwich), such good sourdough toast (from Bermondsey’s The Snapery) and such good spinach, flecked with confit garlic, all again soused in excellent olive oil.
The Garden Café is a brilliant solution to the vexed question of how to create a place attached to a museum, embodying its values but reaching beyond it, a conundrum that seems to have foxed the Design Museum in Kensington, all museum directors perhaps still traumatised by the Saatchi slogan for the V&A in the Eighties, “an ace caff, with quite a nice museum attached”.
The new Garden Museum is a treasure, and the Garden Café is not the least part of it.
The Garden Café, London: 'A lovely new space' – restaurant review ...
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Visitors to London’s Garden Museum will be impressed to see how its new café is bedding in The Garden Café, The Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1 7LB.
Meal for two, including drinks and service: £60-£90 Set into the polished concrete floor of the new café at London’s Garden Museum, hard by Lambeth Palace, is a gravestone.
This rubbed and pot-marked gravestone, an inheritance from the de-consecrated church which houses the Garden Museum, suits the space.
The Garden Café occupies a sparkling new glass and beaten-copper pavilion, and is the restaurant London never knew it needed.
On the menu: Owen Brown classics, such as crispy black pudding potato cake, killer roast pork sandwiches and his legendary Vimto trifle (thehinchliffe.co.uk).
Restaurant Review: The Garden Café | The London Economic
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Almost every gallery or museum in London is joined by a glorified tea room, many of which are also touted as restaurants in their own right, yet most are magnificently awful.
Bucking the trend, however, The Garden Museum (Britain’s only museum dedicated to the art, history and design of gardens) reopened during the summer, as did the affixed Garden Café – open daily for lunch (plus an evening service each Friday).
Although The Garden Café’s opening hours seldom extend into the evening, the restaurant is open in the morning for tea and cake – with pastry seeming a speciality of the kitchen.
An urban oasis on the edge of central London, with casual service and unfussy, produce-focussed cooking at it’s core; The Garden Café is one of London’s only museum restaurants of note.
The Garden Café can be found at Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Road, London, SE1 7LB.