Visitors to Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum are in for a treat as the venue’s KG Café serves up a new vegetarian menu to honour Linda McCartney and complement her retrospective, currently making its UK debut at the museum.
In a nod to one of the country’s pioneers in making meat free eating more mainstream, the Café run by Encore, the council’s hospitality and events service, is serving up vegetarian and vegan hot meals, soups and salads every Monday, as part of the wider Meat Free Monday campaign.
Dishes including beer-battered tofu ‘n’ chips; sweet potato, red pepper and butternut squash coconut curry; rosemary and garlic-marinated pan-fried tempeh, and a vegetarian haggis burger make this a mouth-watering menu. This is addition to a selection of fresh sandwiches and cakes.
Ross McKenzie, senior operations manager for Encore, said “The decision to dish up more planet-friendly meals was informed by the growing popularity of meat free and plant based meals and increasingly a number of visitors to the KG Cafe were choosing or asking about veggie dishes. With the arrival of the Linda McCartney Retrospective it seemed like an ideal opportunity to change the menu and perhaps encourage people to try something different when visiting the museum.”
The scheme may extend beyond its current six month run if it proves a success with Café patrons.
Launched by Paul, Mary and Stella McCartney in 2009, Meat Free Monday is a not-for-profit campaign that aims to raise awareness of the detrimental environmental impact of animal agriculture and industrial fishing.
The campaign encourages people to help slow climate change, conserve precious natural resources and improve their health by having at least one plant-based day each week.
Linda was an acclaimed and prolific photographer while simultaneously transforming the world of meat free eating with her popular recipe books frozen vegetarian meal range.
Curated by Paul, Mary and Stella, the Linda McCartney Retrospective has already wowed audiences in Vienna, Montpellier and Seoul, but this will be the first time it has been seen in the UK. As well as a huge collection of Linda’s photography – including a section dedicated to the family’s time on the Mull of Kintyre – there is archive material including her photographic equipment and a diary from the 1960s, during the heyday of the Beatles.
Paul said: “It is really good having this exhibition in such a cool gallery in Glasgow. Linda would have been so proud of it being held in Scotland. She loved Scotland because it gave us a lot of fond memories, a lot of freedom and a lot of happy times. It is nice to have all of that encapsulated in the Kelvingrove exhibition.”
Linda McCartney Retrospective runs at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum from 5 July 2019 until 12 January 2020. Tickets cost £7, concessions £5, under-16s free.
Adjacent to the exhibition fans of Linda’s work can also snap up books, clothing jewellery bags and prints inspired by Linda McCartney and the MFM movement.
