8 of the World's Most Beautiful Museum Cafés

Henry Cole opened refreshment rooms at South Kensington in 1868, the first of their kind anywhere, and commissioned them as seriously as the galleries. Three interconnecting rooms, named now for their designers: James Gamble, Edward Poynter, William Morris. Morris was 31 and not yet famous, so his was known simply as the Green Dining Room. The Gamble Room's ceramic, enamel and iron were chosen for practical reasons - washable, and resistant to steam, cooking smells and fire, which mattered when horse-drawn engines had to reach a suburb that was still half rural. Next door, Poynter's old Grill Room keeps its cast-iron range, disconnected, and blue tiles painted by women students at the National Art Training School, who were paid for the work.

The museum opened in 1891, built by Gottfried Semper and Karl von Hasenauer for the Habsburg collections. The café is a much later addition - 1988 - but it took the best room in the building: the Cupola Hall, directly under the octagonal dome, with marble columns, gilding and red seating arranged in a ring on a tiled floor. Melange and apfelstrudel, served in a space most cities would keep roped off. On the staircase nearby are early paintings by Gustav Klimt, his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch. Thursday runs late, with dinner under the dome; once a month the hall turns into a bar with a DJ.

The dining room of the Hôtel d'Orsay, built into the station for the 1900 Exposition and listed as a historic monument. Ceilings by Gabriel Ferrier and Benjamin Constant, gilding, chandeliers, tall windows towards the Seine. It has been a restaurant, on and off, for most of its life. A 2025 refit took its colours from the central ceiling medallion and brought in chairs by Jacopo Foggini, which are the only obviously contemporary thing in the room. Thursday evenings it opens for dinner. If the Belle Époque is too much, Café Campana sits behind the station clock upstairs, done by the Campana brothers.

Wes Anderson designed this for the Fondazione's 2015 opening in a converted distillery south of the centre. Formica in pink and mint, veneered panelling, pink terrazzo, and wallpaper printed to reproduce the roofline of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele overhead. There is a jukebox and two pinball machines. Anderson said it would make a decent film set but a better place to write one, which is either modest or exactly right. It has its own door on Via Orobia and keeps its own hours, separate from the galleries - though those hours have changed more than once, so check before crossing town. Order a brioche at the bar.

Run by Oficina, the Amsterdam-West canteen founded by Zana Josipovic and Naiara Sabandar, who started here as a pop-up and stayed. Two rooms. The coffee bar sits in the redesigned entrance hall among the sculptures, free to walk into, with La Cabra coffee, Japanese teas and cinnamon buns.

Knud W. Jensen opened Louisiana in 1958 around an old villa, with Jørgen Bo and Wilhelm Wohlert linking the pavilions by glass corridors through the park. The café takes the end of that sequence: glass to the Øresund, the Calder terrace outside, Sweden across the water on a clear day. You sit on the Louisiana Chair, black-painted beech with a round blue-green seat, which Wohlert designed in 1957 for the concert hall and which the museum never saw reason to replace. Thirty-five minutes by train from Copenhagen.

Nezu Kaichirō's collection of pre-modern Japanese and East Asian art has been open since 1941; Kengo Kuma rebuilt the museum in 2009, behind a bamboo-lined approach off Omotesando. The café is his too - a glass box standing in the garden, glazed on three sides. The interior is kept deliberately dark so the green outside reads stronger. Beyond the windows are ponds, stone paths and four teahouses you can look at but not enter, across seventeen thousand square metres that most visitors do not expect to find behind Aoyama. Museum admission is required, food orders stop around three, and the window tables go early.

Opened in 2001 with the museum, in the William Starr Miller House on Fifth Avenue, and named for Serge Sabarsky, who assembled the collection with Ronald Lauder and did not live to see it hang. The room is a Viennese kaffeehaus argued from the evidence: Hoffmann light fittings, Loos furniture, banquettes in an Otto Wagner fabric from 1912, a grand piano in the corner for the cabaret nights. Sachertorte, goulash, schnitzel, and a queue, since breakfast and lunch are walk-in only. The building has been closed since May for structural work. The café, book store and design shop return on 1 October; the galleries follow on 12 November.