At Tate Liverpool this year, visitors to the café have been tucking into a rather artistic range of food based on works of art, including a Damien Hirst.
Taste of Tate was a twelve-week project running from January 2008 for fifteen to seventeen year-old refugees, run in partnership with Refugee Action. The project was part of an overall objective to introduce new audiences to Tate, but also had the purely practical aim of giving these unaccompanied young refugees useful life skills. The young people had four sessions with an artist at Tate Liverpool, engaging with the Collection displays and coming up with recipe ideas based on works they had chosen. Sometimes the inspiration came from the artist’s nationality, or from the look and feel of the work itself.
The young people went on to work with a chef at Liverpool Community College to tease out their ideas and translate them into real food, and three dishes were later served at the café in Tate Liverpool. They included marinated salmon ‘butterflies’ inspired by Damien Hirst and lemon grass-infused ‘kinetic’ kebabs based on Naum Gabo’s work.
‘This provided a different perspective on the Collection and allowed us to reinterpret it,’ says Michelle Freeman, Education Curator for Young Tate at Liverpool. ‘Special menu cards indicated the dishes were inspired by our artists, so it also opened up the Collection to people who might have just come in for a coffee.’
