V&A Cafe is little treasure

London is full of architectural gems, but living here you tend to take them for granted. Familiarity breeds indifference. Over the years I’ve become immune to the beauty of Big Ben or the airy space of Trafalgar Square. I can even look out of the window each morning and forget that I’m staring at Wren’s masterpiece of St Paul’s. Yet, like so many people, when I was a schoolboy one of my half-term highlights was a trip to visit the sights of the capital. Then it was the Science Museum to discover for ourselves how things worked, or marvelling at the dinosaur bones in the Natural History Museum. A sense of wonder was as much a part of the journey as the squashed sandwich and bag of Hula Hoops that kept me going.

The V&A never really featured on my wish list – it was much too fancy and decorative for a Northern boy (even a sensitive one) – but last week I was meeting a dress designer friend for lunch and, on impulse, we decided to go to the V&A. He wanted some extra inspiration for a wedding gown he was creating (in fact, I think he had a hangover) and I wanted to eat somewhere different.

The exterior of the building is unprepossessing; you could almost pass by without noticing it was there – just another Victorian lump. Inside it’s as vast and marble clad as any international museum, but the staff are unusually welcoming. And it’s free.

Here you’ll find the biggest decorative arts collection in the world, but we headed for the new jewel-lery section, ogling pendants given by Elizabeth I to her courtiers and diamonds worn by Catherine the Great. My designer friend’s favourite was Lady Mountbatten’s ‘tutti-frutti’ ruby, sapphire, emerald and diamond bandeau, which she bought from Cartier in 1929. This was ‘beautiful bling’, he sighed.

To get to the café you have to negotiate your way along endless wide passages lined with shrunken stone heads of people you’ve never heard of. Thank goodness the custom of creating marble busts is no longer fashionable. Can you imagine a visitor in the next century looking into the frozen features of the current crop of politicians? Most of them are bad enough in the flesh. John Prescott in marble? Yeuch...

Unfortunately, the first part of the restaurant you see is the horrible modern extension, which is bland, white and boring. It looks like a works canteen and smells of school dinners, but venture a little further in and you discover a lavishly ornate and cavernous dining hall. Walls and ceilings are sumptuously covered with decorative tiles. There are pillars and columns; an oversized and mirrored fireplace; giant fairy light balls hang suspended from the ceiling, looking like swollen rejects from your Christmas decoration box – or at least as if they’d been designed by Antony Gormley.

In fact, the food on offer is a bit like choosing from a pick ’n’ mix, since all tastes and times of the day are catered for. You can graze on soup, nibble on salad, be sustained by meat and two veg or tuck into a cream tea. You could start in the morning and stay all day. We chose Thai chicken and tandoori salmon salads, which were as nice and as unremarkable as any salad could be. The accompanying beers were refreshingly cold.

Carrot cake (my favourite) was moist and spicy and the lemon cheesecake was good, although the chocolate base was hard. Considering that the museum was packed with schoolchildren (how nostalgic I felt for one brief moment), the queues of people were being reduced with remarkable efficiency. There were lots of happy-looking tourists and I noticed plenty of middle-aged women eating on their own.

Afterwards we strolled in the museum’s sunlit gardens, which are completely ruined by the addition of ugly green plastic things that are no doubt ‘art’ but look exactly like the industrial netting used to keep the public off building sites. There’s a shallow pond, which is better than the Diana memorial version in the park, and there were children playing in it. In fact, the whole place feels very safe and very beautiful.

The V&A may not be an architectural gem, but it’s definitely a national treasure.

V&A Cafe
Cromwell Road, SW7 2RL