Restaurants that do more than one thing

When Petersham Nurseries opened its café with the pioneering Skye Gyngell heading up the kitchen, it was a revolutionary move. The seasonally inspired menu became an enormous pull to the plant nursery and the accompanying store, which sold vintage furniture and antiques among the plant pots. Since then, the trend has travelled. In Copenhagen, diners at ØsterGRO Rooftop Farm can volunteer in the growing garden before sitting down to communal meals. Stepney City Farm brings the same spirit of the hyper-local to East London, pairing a working urban farm with a critically acclaimed restaurant. Diners eat just metres from the ingredients and the farm’s workshops, and community programmes help shape the rhythm of the kitchen. At Aethos Saragano, the farm-to-table approach is taken a step further with foraging walks, where diners gather mushrooms and herbs that later feature in the menu.

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Innovative spaces continue to expand the definition of restaurant hospitality – not just in relation to the gardens supplying the menu but with restaurants acting as a showroom for everything from furniture to art. Just take Restoration Hardware – its enormous furniture stores from the Cotswolds to Sydney are worthy of a day trip thanks to the elegant restaurants. Or, on a smaller and cooler scale, Café Niko in Copenhagen, which combines perfect coffee and cheese toasties with homeware from its design store NIKO JUNE. Every piece – from the tableware to the seating – is available to buy. In Bali, Rüsters combines a similar format: Nordic design that shapes the entire dining experience as well as a ceramics shop and pottery workshops for guests willing to get their hands dirty.

When it comes to the art world, La Colombe d’Or in Provence has to be one of the earliest iterations of a destination restaurant with scene-stealing art (think Joan Miró murals and Picasso on the walls). But more contemporary examples include Frevo, which hides a Michelin-starred tasting menu behind a contemporary art gallery in Greenwich Village, New York. While in London’s Mayfair, Mount Street Restaurant blends a multi-storey gallery space displaying Andy Warhol’s ‘Lobster’ alongside its iconic lobster pie, thanks to curation from the ArtFarm group – Hauser & Wirth’s hospitality arm.

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Restaurants are also experimenting with cultural exchange through chef residencies. Carousel in London set the pace in 2014 with its revolving line-up of guest chefs, a model now echoed by Paris’s Chop Chop Love and by some of the world’s leading restaurants. At Aethos Lisbon, weekly members’ lunches cooked by visiting chefs keep the atmosphere relaxed and constantly shifting.

Meanwhile, culture is also shaping the dining experience through sound, with a recent listening-bar revival inspiring restaurants to tune in. In Peckham, Jumbi specialises in Afro-Caribbean tracks alongside curry goat and jerk chicken. In Paris, Bambino takes inspiration from the owner’s travels in Japan and Tel Aviv. And Aethos London Shoreditch has embraced the same spirit, hosting weekly listening nights for members. It’s another sign of how the boundaries around dining are blurring, as more restaurants craft compelling, multi-sensory identities. What emerges is a landscape where the most interesting restaurants are those treating culture, community and design as essential ingredients in their own right.