Bompas and Parr’s British Museum Of Food

I was so disappointed with BMOF. I love food, I love museums and I love exhibitions but tbh I’m not really sure what this place is.
You pay a fiver, there are 5 small rooms and well that’s about it. The first 2 rooms were busy when we arrived so we were told to go straight upstairs. One of the ‘rooms’ is actually the stairs where there is lots of artwork about food displayed. There are laminated cards with info on them but it is really hard to see all the photos/​painting especially with the awful lighting and a load of people on the stairs.
We then went in to a room of butterflies. It was pretty for sure. This was meant to be all about the importance of pollination buuuuut didn’t have any info on this in there.
Next room was a collection of menus. I thought I’d love this room as they were to span decades and more importantly I spend ages looking at menus! Again accessing them was hard and there were only a few cool ones. Some completely pointless and some only showing the front cover — how was I meant to know what was on the menu?!
Once back downstairs we tried again with the first room to be told it was too busy. The other room ‘the chocolate room’ was ok and I got to eat some choco drops from Hotel Chocolat but again it was sort of nothing.
Finally got to sit and share a headset with my friends in the first room. It was Bompas and Parr talking about their new museum… And how you should be enjoying the massage chair replicating our digestive tract… Wellll there are only 2 of those so most people don’t get a go… Pointless.
I wouldn’t recommend to anyone especially not for a fiver and I’m afraid to say I was embarrassed to bring my friend here…

Small and quirky. This is a fun place to spend a lazy afternoon (it’s small so expect to stay an hour tops). My favorite bit is the butterfly effect room, beautiful little creators flying through the room. Suggestion, Stop by the museum then grab a cup of hot chocolate at Rabot1745.
Once you have finished your lush chocolate, saunter to the Borough market.
You can’t go wrong

This is a joke. A total ££ trap. To call this a museum is just plain wrong. They start you off in a small room with a projector to watch a film on how food is digested. If you’re lucky, you can be one of 2 people that get to sit in a massage chair during the 3 min. video. It’s a poor quality movie with gurgling sounds. You’re then sent into a room where you can taste chocolate while listening to different sounds. I think they’re all the same chocolate — it’s a little. gimmicky. Then you go upstairs to the «pollination» exhibit which is just a butterfly house. Granted — the butterflies are very beautiful. But its a far stretch to put as an exhibit in a «food museum». The last room is a menu exhibit. 3 cases of old and new menus with a few hung on the wall…
Oh wait — I’m mistaken… there is another «exhibit»…weird photos of food hung on the walls of the staircase.
And that’s it. I was really hoping it would be a great museum filled with the history of food and how it’s had an affect on forming cultures, etc… but it was a joke. Total waste of £5/​person.
unless you want to see beautiful butterflies… don’t waste your time or money.

An interesting experience… and I think I got my £5 worth. I think I may have hyped it up more before I got there, thinking it would be bigger and more experiential (aka more food in my mouth please), but I still enjoyed it. The most interesting part was the «journey through your system» while sitting in massage chairs, but to be honest, I was so distracted by the pulling and squeezing of my body, I couldn’t really «learn» what the guys on TV were talking about. The chocolate booths were ok… but again, was hoping for more taste bud experiences. Not REALLY sure how well butterflies ties into the theme, but it was a neat space with some beautiful butterflies. If you’re already at Borough Market and have some time to kill, why not?

As I understand it, this is a pop-​up experience more than a museum and I feel like naming themselves «British Museum of Food» is really biting them in the behind.
It’s a very interesting and artistic exhibition that’s really more of an experience than a museum and well worth the price of a fancy coffee in town.
My favourite was definitely the massage chairs that mimic digestion, it’s a fantastic massage for one and quite interesting as well. There’s just two chairs though, so queues!
The chocolate experience (listening to different sounds while tasting the same cheap chocolate) could use some headphones to block out outside noises. Taste/​texture distinction just wasn’t great enough with all the noise distracting from the recorded sounds we were supposed to listen to.
The small exhibition of menus was sorely disappointing, there just wasn’t enough to see and most of the menus weren’t even opened to where the food was listed.
The small butterfly room was a nice touch, but it felt very out of place.
All in all it’s definitely worth a fiver, but I hope they follow the plan of expanding the whole thing to actually include history of food or even contemporary food-​related exhibits. Definitely way too small of a museum!

There’s a British Museum of food? Wow! I was so excited to find out I had to to come try it out. I would say to think of this as more of an experience/​exhibition.
I was a little disappointed that there was there no food in the museum. Well that’s a slight lie as there is a chocophonic experience where you taste samples of chocolate to different soundtracks.
In the other room downstairs you get to be a piece of food bring digested, you fully engorged by a huge moving massage chair that will squeeze and gently pummel you as if you were a piece of food going through the digestive track whilst watching and listening to a video about what happens when you swallow.
Upstairs is a butterly room which is slightly disconnected from food, but is filled with some amazing butterflies. I’ve never seen ones so big and they don’t seem to mind you getting close to them either. The other room is a bit of disappointing as it’s just glass cabinets filled with postcards and other bits of paper.
I definitely think there is a future in a museum and it’s worth visiting for the swallowing experience and butterflies alone.

This isn’t a museum as usual. Here you won’t learn anything about food which is a bit disappointing since it’s called Museum of Food. It’s more an art gallery with installations about food: sit in a chair reproducing the digestive system, eat chocolate listening to different sound, a butterfly room and a room with samples menu.
Very small exhibit.

The museum is small and located in the historic Borough Market — what better place to be inspired to learn about food? The museum is very small — only 2 floors, 4 rooms total. In my opinion, the ground floor is the best: one room it has a video going on about how your body digests foods (with the sound effects) and the two best massage chairs I’ve ever encountered — they are a must try!!! For me, that was the best part, but the chocolate room next door was a close second. This was a small room with four stations enclosed by curtains with different bits of chocolate that you taste to different sounds playing in the background, to signify how noise and sound affect the taste of what you eat, which I frankly found pretty fascinating. The next floor had a butterfly exhibit, crediting them for the pollen they produce and another room was more informational about food with post cards, mementos and whatnot. I love the idea of the museum but would like them to make the top floor as inspiring and interesting as the first!

No no no no no. Don’t waste your time. A 5er for admission and it’s still too much. The top floor is ½ inexplicably an over-​engineered butterfly sanctuary that is 30 degrees celsius, 70% humidity, and 100% self-​guided tour through computer print-​outs of random butterfly facts. Intended to highlight the «unsung heroes of pollination», the connection is tenuous and back-​of-​the-​envelope in execution at best.
The remaining ½ of the top floor is a collection of 30-​odd menus from past to present, but hardly any of them show any food! The much-​celebrated «Winston Churchill signed menu», for example, is a printed computer scan of a menu back with 50 signatures, one of which belongs to Mr. Churchill. Another in the exclusive collection is a take-​out menu from a chicken joint down the street.
The stairwell has pictures of famous places created by food — yay Google — not worth paying.
And ground floor — i.e. the rest of the museum — has exactly two things: (1) a four-​booth «sound & taste» experiment where you taste a chocolate chip in four different sound environments and mark bitterness and smoothness. Hint: I’m pretty sure they’re all the same chocolate. And since it’s so poorly crafted, you can basically only hear the outside noise anyways because it’s just a curtain on the outside of the booth, so just grab as many chips as you can really get away with and move on. (2) a 3-​minute video on repeat of how a particle of food goes through your body. They add headphones and massage chairs for 2 people at a time (read: queue up!) to experience how the FOOD feels traveling your oesophagus.
Come on, guys. Money trap for locals, and nothing more. If the curators actually think it’s something more valuable, time to leave art school and begin seeing through the eyes of your everyman, because this «museum» is completely out of touch with reality.
p. s. when they start issuing refunds for lack of experience, please ping me!

It’s small, but it’s fantastic.
Bompas and Parr are geniuses of food. They’ve cooked with lava. They’ve sent coffee into space. They run the alcoholic architecture (aka the alcohol cloud) around the corner. They know their stuff.
So when I heard they were opening the first British Museum Of Food, I was excited.
Now, as others have said, it is small. It’s not a museum that will take you all day — probably about half an hour or so. But man, do they fill it with things in that half an hour. It’s a mix of both interactive (you can sit in massage chairs and literally feel like you’re being swallowed alive as you watch the screen in front of you) and historical (they have a room filled with old British menus from around the city).
And of course, the highlight is the butterfly room, which has tons of butterflys in the enclosure and info to explain why they are the unsung heroes of pollination.
It’s their first attempt, which means I have no doubt it’s only going to be bigger and better from here. But for a small price, you can get a small slice of British food history and education, and that’s pretty neat.

Save your £5 entry fee to this «museum» and buy some actual food at the nearby borough market instead.
This tiny museum (more like half finished exhibition) has just 4 bedroom sized rooms to see. You can tour the whole place in under 15 minutes (which we did).
The most interesting room is the tropically heated butterfly room which houses live butterflies fluttering under pink UV light.
The second room is a smaller room filled with 10 – 20 menus.
The 3^rd just has just a movie playing introducing the museum and 2 massage chairs. The queue for the massage chairs were ridiculous even though there were hardly any people in the museum.
The final room houses just 4 tiny booths where you can sample the same cheap chocolate chip chocolates with different music playing. They call it an «experiment».
There are plenty of better yet free exhibitions in London right now for example Jon Rafman’s exhibition at the zabludowicz.
After seeing the museum we went over to bompas and parrs alcohol architecture bar in the same building (which costs an extra £10 to enter). The guy at the entrance was super rude so we didn’t end up going.