Feast Your Eyes: When Art Moves Into Hospitality
Mount Street Restaurant
Mayfair, London
Art no longer lives only on the gallery wall. Increasingly, it is something you eat with, sleep beside, and wake up inside of. Around the world, hotels and restaurants are collapsing the boundary between hospitality and exhibition — turning dinner into a show and bedrooms into private galleries.
As Ollie from Mustard Contemporary puts it:
“Outside the gallery or institution, art assumes an entirely different role. In the home, it integrates seamlessly into daily rituals; in restaurants, it emerges unexpectedly within the social fabric; in hotels, it lingers in transitional spaces, quietly accompanying movement. These are not orchestrated encounters but moments when art discloses itself without fanfare — embedded within the rhythms of everyday life.”
That sense of ease, of art woven into everyday life, is exactly what Mustard Contemporary stands for. As a gallery, they’re committed to making the art world more accessible, stripping away its barriers without losing quality or connoisseurship. It’s something we at Brand Reveller helped shape when we created their brand strategy and identity — positioning them as a gallery that brings contemporary art into everyday conversation.
Together, we’ve selected a handful of places where art isn’t a backdrop, it’s a star.
London’s Art Restaurants
Toklas, London
Friends of ours and a previous Brand Reveller client, Toklas exemplifies how a restaurant can double as a cultural platform. Its pared-back modernism is the frame, but the real story is in its exhibition programme and collaborations, where food and art live under one roof. toklaslondon.com
Mount St. Restaurant, Mayfair
Artfarm (Hauser & Wirth’s hospitality arm) created a Gesamtkunstwerk here: Freud, Warhol, and Matisse on the walls; Rashid Johnson beneath your feet; Paul McCarthy referenced in the salt and pepper shakers. Dining as total artwork.
mountstrestaurant.com
The Portrait Restaurant, National Portrait Gallery
High above Trafalgar Square, this space extends the NPG into hospitality. Portraits of cultural icons line the walls while London itself forms the backdrop — art as dinner guest.
theportraitrestaurant.com
Lolo by José Pizarro, Bermondsey
Personal, eclectic, and emotional. Emin, Ackroyd, Blake — all curated with the same intimacy as Pizarro’s food. Here, art isn’t staged for spectacle but chosen for connection.
josepizarro.com/venues/lolo
The Artfarm World
The Fife Arms, Braemar
Owned by Iwan and Manuela Wirth, the Scottish Highlands inn is home to over 16,000 works, from a Freud sketch to a Louise Bourgeois spider in the courtyard. A hotel as living museum.
thefifearms.com
Hauser & Wirth Menorca
The island outpost turns a former naval hospital into a gallery and cultural centre, with Piet Oudolf gardens and a restaurant that feels like part of the exhibition.
menorca.hauserwirth.com
Beyond London
The Thief, Oslo
Linked to the Astrup Fearnley Museum, with Olafur Eliasson in the lobby and Cindy Sherman above the bed. A museum visit that doesn’t end when the doors close.
thethief.com
The Silo, Cape Town
Built above Zeitz MOCAA, with suites doubling as galleries and The Vault hosting rotating exhibitions of African contemporary art.
theroyalportfolio.com/the-silo-hotel
Casa Malca, Tulum
Basquiat by the bar, KAWS on the terrace — contemporary art staged against the Caribbean horizon.
casamalca.com
Minos Beach Art Hotel, Crete
An open-air sculpture garden by the Aegean, where light itself becomes part of the installation.
minosbeach.com
An Artful Escape
What we’re seeing is simple, really: art out in the world, meeting people where they are. Not framed at a distance, but part of the atmosphere. For Mustard Contemporary, it’s proof that art doesn’t lose its power outside the gallery — it often gains it.