Review: Enjoying a mother-daughter outing to Tate Britain

The other Saturday, I started my weekend with a second visit to Tate Britain, where we had been invited to review the informal and modern Djanogly Cafe.

As soon as we arrived in this grand museum that houses British art from 1500 to present times, we headed to the Embankment-end of the museum to the soon-to-be-busy museum cafe. My seven-year-old quickly found kids ham sandwiches and a pain au chocolate and was impressed by the snack options like Pom Bears and chocolate rice cakes. From noon, the cafe served hot kids meals like macaroni and cheese, hot dog and breaded scampi (£6.95 for meal and cupcake), and when an adult orders a main course from the adult hot food menu, up to two kids under 12 can eat free, choosing between a lunchbox and a kids hot main meal.

On our morning visit, I chose a Pastrami sandwich (£5.95) and enjoyed freshly squeezed orange juice and a much-needed latte. Starting the museum tour in the cafe, meant we had time to sit down and chat about what we might see and what we remembered from our last visit. We found a comfortable corner table with light streaming in from the museum windows, and we were surprised by how many visitors seemed to have the same plan as us to start the day with a museum fuel stop.

With the museum being so large, we ended up going to completely different galleries on this visit compared to the previous Saturday we went, and I can see us spending many weekends at Tate Britain in the years to come to explore the full collection – and try sketching from the different easels placed around the museum.

One of the highlights for me has been discovering the free museum tours, and we went on a 45-minute tour with an expert guide, who made our morning extremely educational and had me thinking I should return on a weekday morning to do more tours.

For London families, Tate Britain is also particularly interesting to visit right now because of Steve McQueen Year 3 exhibition, which you can read more about in my Steve McQueen Year 3 blog post and I’ve also written a list of tips for families visiting Tate Britain in a post.

Tate Britain is a museum I know we will keep returning to get our weekends off to a creative and enlightening start.

Tags: Art, Djanogly Cafe, Family day out, Review, Tate Britain