Thomas Marks is an associate fellow of the Warburg Institute, London.

Sarah Lucas

‘Eggs are rarely as simple as they seem’

A new book turns the staple into a star and unscrambles its significance beyond the kitchen

1 Jan 2023

An appetite for art – sampling the Tate’s Cézanne-inspired menu

A menu designed to accompany the gallery’s survey of the artist pays homage to the flavours of Provence, but doesn’t quite live up to the works on show

28 Nov 2022
Edward Allington

Surreal suppers – the Japanese art of artificial food

Shokuhin sampuru (food models) may serve the promotional function of luring diners into restaurants but the creation of each replica is a delicate craft

24 Oct 2022
Auguste Escoffier

The Provençal chef who defined French cooking

Auguste Escoffier’s childhood home in a tiny French village is now a museum that tells the tale of a playful dining visionary

26 Sep 2022

How gastronomic maps paved the way for regional French cooking

The first gastronomic map of France may have been created to serve the appetites of greedy Parisians, but it also opened up new ways of eating

30 Aug 2022
A Jewish family home in Baghdad

A culinary education – Claudia Roden’s ode to Jewish cuisine

Twenty-five years after it was first published, ‘The Book of Jewish Food’ remains an invaluable record of the Jewish diaspora and its manifold culinary traditions

27 Jun 2022

Fresh flavours at the National Gallery’s new restaurant

The gallery’s gloomy dining room is now a thing of the past. The restaurant has an elegant new look and menu to match

30 May 2022

Elizabeth David’s taste in Old Masters

Suspicious of photography’s ability to illustrate her colourful accounts of culinary history, food writer Elizabeth David looked to the Old Masters instead

28 Apr 2022
Natura morta con aragosta e rapanelli (1938), Cagnaccio di San Pietro. Private collection.

The Venetian painter whose still lifes look good enough to eat

Cagnaccio di San Pietro grew up in a Venetian fishing village – so it’s no surprise seafood stars in his still lifes

5 Apr 2022
food museum exhibition

Something to savour – at the new Food Museum in Suffolk

An East Anglian museum is turning its attention from the field to the table with provocative results

24 Mar 2022
Meat-shaped stone, China, Qing dynasty. National Palace Museum, Taipei

The art of making stone look good enough to eat

Rocks that resemble food may not be appetising exactly, but they can certainly be a feast for the eyes

4 Mar 2022
Vinette Robinson and Stephen Graham in Boiling Point (2021). Image courtesy Vertigo Releasing

How to turn up the heat in a feature film? Make your actors cook in real time

Philip Barantini shot his 90-minute movie about the drama of a busy restaurant service in one take – and it’s nail-biting stuff

30 Nov 2021
Putting the kitsch in kitchen: Paris Hilton is ready to cook.

Paris Hilton takes a leaf out of Jane Austen’s recipe book

The venerable tradition of copying out recipes in household books lives on in the most unexpected places

27 Sep 2021
The ‘Table Talk’ room at the Museum of the Home, London. Photo: Em Fitzgerald

Food for thought at the Museum of the Home

With Apollo’s food column to fill, Thomas Marks heads to the reimagined museum in East London to inspect its kitchens

28 Jun 2021
Tableau piège – Sevilla Serie Nr. 16 (1991), Daniel Spoerri. MOCAK the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow.

The frozen dinners of Daniel Spoerri

The Swiss artist’s tableaux of tables capture the joys of dining in good company

9 Jun 2021
Supra man: a detail of one of Niko Pirosmani’s feast scenes, included in an exhibition at the Albertina, Vienna in 2018–19.

The jobbing artist who became Georgia’s national painter – thanks to his eye for a feast

Niko Pirosmani’s paintings are a testament to Georgian conviviality – although he didn’t always have a place at the table

19 Apr 2021
Steak night: Dario Cecchini grills a rib-eye, inspired by a still life by Jacopo Chimenti

A taste of the Uffizi, with Tuscany’s top chefs

Videos of top Italian chefs chewing over the Uffizi’s collection have a delightfully homemade flavour

1 Mar 2021
The National Gallery, closed and an empty Trafalgar Square on 24 March 2020. Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

If shops can reopen in April, why can’t museums?

Museums in England will have to wait until May to reopen but shops, gyms and libraries are set to open in April. What’s the logic in that?

22 Feb 2021
Bon vivant – Keith Floyd in 1991.

The best of Keith Floyd, dished up on canvas

The colourful TV chef Keith Floyd makes an unlikely subject for fine art – but for the painter Lydia Blakeley, he has all the right ingredients

8 Feb 2021

In 18th-century Europe, bizarre oranges and lemons were collector’s items

Weird and wonderful citrus fruit were once highly prized possessions – and one German fanatic made prints of the hundreds of varieties he laid his hands on

20 Jan 2021
Douglas Gordon preparing Cullen skink

Visual feasts – a collection of recipes by video artists

A new cookbook may inspire you to make Cullen skink with Douglas Gordon or Ming Wong’s congee with canned fish

23 Nov 2020
View of the extension on the back of the former Museum and Art Gallery and Central Library.

‘It is hard not to smile on first stepping inside the Box’ – at Plymouth’s new museum

It might not work from the outside, but inside Plymouth’s new civic museum curators have taken a fresh approach to Plymouth’s wide-ranging collections

11 Nov 2020
Table (late 18th century), circle of Lorenzo Dolci.

What not to miss at TEFAF Online

With galleries encouraged to focus on a single masterpiece, this year’s online fair includes an array of museum-quality works

30 Oct 2020
A museum visit conducted by the education charity Art History Link-Up.

School visits to museums are vital – so let’s hope they can restart soon

Though inevitable, the suspension of school visits this year is a great loss – and a reminder of how important children are to the future of museums

26 Oct 2020