Are these the best work canteens in the world?

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Look at a photograph of Polentina, an Italian restaurant in east London. At first glance it appears to be a typical trendy dining room. The walls are the honeyed pink hue of fresh plaster, tables are dressed with wildflowers. The flatware, onto which ravioli and spaghetti are lovingly spooned, is vintage porcelain, reminiscent of pieces you’d find in your own grandmother’s cupboard.

Polentina is no ordinary restaurant, though. For a start, it’s on an industrial estate surrounded by random workplaces: its neighbours include a mechanic, an Amazon warehouse and a storage lockup. More surprisingly, it’s located within a garment factory, on the first floor of a building you need to be buzzed into. There’s no pavement shopfront to entice diners, nor passing footfall. Polentina’s primary purpose is, in fact, to serve as a staff canteen.

Unless you work at Google or Goldman Sachs, most staff canteens are fairly miserable affairs: somewhere to microwave your home leftovers, with bad lighting, soulless stretches of tables and vending machines. “Canteens generally are just a bit sad,” says Sophia Massarella, the self-taught cook at the helm of Polentina’s kitchen, which is part of a growing wave of smaller workplaces that offer wholesome and hearty food that leaves employees feeling “well-fed and refreshed”, she says.

These new cafeterias might include David Chipperfield’s Kantine in Berlin, or the Jacquemus break room in Paris, filled with tables draped in white linen, where fresh lemons are displayed in silver-plated bowls. The restaurant at On Labs’ headquarters in Zürich, meanwhile, is filled with modernist sofas and coffee tables, and serves a buffet of vegan meals. “We imagined it as the living room of the On headquarters,” says Frédéric Louis Brunner, founder of Roots, which runs the restaurant and has several other outposts in Zürich – the “vibrant hub” within the Swiss sports giant’s headquarters being its largest location yet.

Good staff food is not a new concept. Several excellent restaurants started out this way. River Cafe in London and Pianoterra in Paris were both conceived as staff canteens. In mid-20th-century Britain, canteens thrived in working-class sectors such as manufacturing or labouring. “Companies like Cadbury or Bournville saw it as a moral obligation to look after their workers with nourishing food and regular breaks,” says food historian Dr Annie Gray. By the early 1950s, Transport For London operated 178 canteens across the city, a benefit that changed in the 1980s when companies cut costs and canteens largely shut. The closures coincided with the rise of the “meal deal”. All too often, lunch these days is a sandwich eaten at one’s desk.

A new generation of cooks – and employers – is now trying to reclaim it. Melanie Arnold is co-founder of the Shoreditch restaurant Rochelle Canteen, which serves the studio community in and around its location on Arnold Circus. It got its name because, as she explains, a canteen connotes “proper” cooking. A restaurant is more “formal”, while a café is “a place for breakfast, cakes and soups… we wanted to be more than that”, she says of the eatery she opened for weekday lunches in 2004 with Margot Henderson. Two decades later, nearby workers and members of the public frequent the canteen. It’s become renowned for its wholesome food and relaxed mood. 

Many modern versions are now opening up to cater to the wider public. Chipperfield Kantine, located on the David Chipperfield campus in Mitte, Berlin, leaves 40 per cent of its tables available to non-patrons, while 50 per cent of visitors to Roots Kitchen at On Labs every day are not staff. In Melbourne, diners at Liminal soak up the corporate environment that comes with its proximity to the offices of Google, YouTube and Nike. Also offering proximity is Albers At The Block café in London’s De Beauvoir Block – the creative co-working office hub that houses media and beauty brands as well as casting and talent agencies, illustrators and production companies. The chefs there recently opened a full-service restaurant nearby named Albers: highlights include spatchcock quail with romesco and whole lemon sole with tomato and chervil. Meanwhile, Polentina is open to the public for lunch on Fridays and Saturdays, and serves dinner four nights a week. The dining space has a floor-to-ceiling partition window that looks out into the factory, with views of sewing machines. On Friday lunchtimes, guests can eat pasta soundtracked by the hum of the machines.

The canteen feels dynamic in an era of generic hospitality. They encourage more sustainable thinking as well. In order to reduce food waste and manage overheads, canteens offer a tight selection of daily changing dishes. “We need to change it all the time so people don’t get bored,” says Nathan Toleman, founder and executive chairman of The Mulberry Group, which runs nine restaurants across Melbourne, including Liminal. Chipperfield Kantine offers only three lunch options daily – one soup, one main dish and one salad. Meat options are on Wednesdays, and fish on a Friday. There’s a tangible, beautiful simplicity to the menus that generally partner with local suppliers and create dishes using fresh seasonal vegetables.

They also help to build communities, and nurture inter-department friendships. In the 1950s, a canteen offered workers the chance to switch off from their trade with their colleagues by their side. As a space, they help to foster a real sense of belonging. “People relax because they are not at work, they are at lunch,” says Peter Miller, a bookseller in Seattle who found the deluge of plastic takeaway containers bought by staff to be so depressing he initiated an ad-hoc midday meal within the store. Someone is tasked with bringing lemons, avocado and parsley for a salad; another with bread and butter; another with oils and basil; someone else is in charge of napkins. The meal itself is often pasta, rice or lentils. Such is the ritual, Miller has even published a cookbook, Lunch at the Shop: The Art and Practice of the Midday Meal (Abrams Image), dedicated to the art of quick, easy, communal cooking. Miller enjoys the experience primarily because “you can hear the staff laughing”.

Likewise, staff from Apparel Tasker, the garment factory where Polentina is located, enjoy a spread of food – like a mezze – of whatever Massarella is cooking that week, served on platters and sold for a subsidised price. Many of the staff take home the leftovers for free. “It’s a really nice sense of community,” says Massarella. “Food definitely brings people together.” The canteen proves that a midweek lunch is worth not just savouring but sharing.