The art of eating out: why the best chefs are opening restaurants in art galleries

Two years ago, at 8am, chef Richard Corrigan visited the Francis Bacon exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, then went to The Wolseley for champagne and a bacon sandwich with the archivist who had taken him round. “I was gorged, mentally gorged,” he explains. “He was the most horrid creature in the widest world.” A glass or two of champagne and a bacon sandwich made sense.

It made sense, not just for the obvious symmetry of bacon and Bacon, but because after being mentally gorged, he needed to be physically restored; to recover from Bacon’s assault on the senses. Corrigan is one of the country’s most revered chefs, with restaurants in Mayfair, the City, Ireland and, most recently, the top of the National Portrait Gallery in London. Yet, when confronted with art as exceptional and extreme as Bacons’ lurid distortions of man and beast, he didn’t need a tasting menu of 12 courses. He needed what all of us need when discomfited: buttered bread and bacon.

“It’s a hungry relationship, between artists and chefs,” Corrigan continues – and I like the sentiment, even if I don’t fully get what it means. I like the idea, particularly within the context of Francis Bacon, that the connection between food and art is centred on appetite, before anything more highfalutin. Corrigan’s National Portrait Gallery restaurant, The Portrait, opened in the summer last year. The year before, Spanish chef Jose Pizarro opened a restaurant and bar in the Royal Academy of Arts.