We live in times generally unfriendly to ritual, religious or civic. For 50 years at least, churches have stripped away once-glorious liturgical rituals in order, they say, to render themselves more accessible, even as pews have emptied. On the civic side, great art museums – some would say the cathedrals of our secular age – once invited visitors to a ritual that gave a rest to the feet and the eyes while enhancing the experience of being there in the first place. It was called having lunch.

The space is still there but is a shell. ‘Redesigned’ is not the adjective; vandalised would be better

Visual attentiveness requires energy even if, like me, you shy away from reading the labels. Energy requires calories. This may be why, circumstances permitting, I am a morning museum-goer. A good breakfast behind me, I like to be there when the doors open, at the pitch of alertness in anticipation of revisiting or seeing afresh portraits, peeled lemons, skies and landscapes and all the rest. I am there when the guard unlocks the gates also in anticipation of lunch before me. Call it a reward, a respite, a ritual.

Lunch, as we all know, is a meal that has fared poorly in our hyper-casualised culture. Back when I was fully in the swing of things and working in a big city, an hour or more midday repast out of the office was not frowned upon. Nor was having a beer to wash it down. The same habit applied when visiting a great museum. Grab-and-go describes an opposite approach: of feeding, not dining, as if all we needed was fuel for the machine and no respite at all.

You won’t go hungry come lunchtime at any of the renowned galleries. You may however encounter some variety in what is on offer along the casual-to-formal spectrum, with the preponderance falling heavily toward the casual end. This is a loss for museum-goers. Museums are supposed to be serious places, treasure-houses of culture. Even with whole collections nowadays digitised and available online, the power of being in the real presence of great art has not been diminished.

I was reminded of this on a recent visit – my first since the late plague and accompanying urban ructions – to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. That I had not been to the temple in some time no doubt sharpened my expectations and, when it came to lunch, my disappointment. Much remained the same, my favourite dark-panelled Dutch rooms with their scenes of where I grew up as they have always been. With no special big exhibitions to clutter things up, my effort to arrive early yielded the delight of a great gallery that wasn’t overrun with tourists.

In years past, the NGA’s flagship lunch spot was a palm-court oasis in the heart of the old West Wing with sculpture and dribbling fountain. It offered table service, proper place-settings and cloth napkins, good wine and a short but well-made three-course menu, suitable to linger over and digest. Nicely spaced tables invited private conversation or, if you were solo, a place to read the exhibition takeaways, reflect on what you’d seen – or just daydream. There was almost always a queue. Sometimes, the palm court presented themed menus in the spirit of visiting exhibitions. In particular I recall respectable renditions of steak and kidney pie, sausage and mash, cottage pie, fruit crumble with heavy cream, Stilton: plain but delicious old-time fare of the English countryside to accompany an exhibition of Constable’s striking six-foot landscapes.

I recall other such culinary performances: French provincial cooking à la Elizabeth David for the impressionists; Dutch delicacies (yes, there are some) for a show of 17th-century paintings and ship models documenting the rise of Holland’s sea-going empire and the wealth sent home from the Indies that underwrote the golden age of Dutch painting. A top-quality kitchen is necessary to elevate this sort of thing above mere marketing and, when done with care, makes lunch a cheerful continuation-at-table of gallery-going.

It is sad to report that this is all gone now. The space is still there but is a shell. ‘Redesigned’ is not quite the adjective; vandalised would be better. Serve yourself and don’t forget to bus your own trash. Is the excuse Covid or cost-cutting or ordinary institutional dim-wittedness? Who knows, but you would be better advised to step outside for an honest Hebrew National hot dog or Polish sausage from the vendors lined up along Constitution Avenue.

These patrons know a classy place for lunch and their coin is as good as the most fearsome art-hound’s

Others do better. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts offers a sit-down lunch at its glass-enclosed New American Café where the menu tilts heavily toward starters, sandwiches and salads, on the no doubt correct presumption that lunch for most of us no longer means a meal centred on an entrée, of which here there are just three of the most predictable: pan-seared salmon, pan-roasted chicken breast, grilled steak.

The Dining Room at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, overlooking Central Park, ups the bar considerably with ten mains and, giving credit where credit is due, the best ever art-inspired naming of a dish: the ‘Manet/Degas Poisson’, a sole meunière with lobster. No fooling around there.

It is to the Old World, however, that hungry museum-goers might best resort to lunch and, sometimes, to dinner. The French, with reason, show off. The Louvre’s full-service Café Marly, which overlooks the pyramid (you may be seated with your back to it), in addition to the usual global items, will spoil you with Oscietra Imperial caviar, steak tartare and, crowning all, veal chop with chanterelle mushrooms.

As an American writing in an English journal, I would be prudent not to slight London, where the National Gallery houses a restaurant called Ochre, presumably after the colour of its wainscoted walls and where the private dining room overlooks Nelson’s Column. The card culls sources from all around the kingdom: venison tartare from Exmoor; Hereford sirloin; Cotswold chicken; Jersey oysters; Severn and Wye smoked salmon. It is carefully noted that the caviar comes from Cornwall. There is even an echo of Empire, somehow overlooked by the language police: ham hock and parsley terrine with ‘Indian military pickle’. What looks a very serviceable three-course set lunch is yours for £38. Christmas Tea runs to £55, add a tenner for champagne. Beef Wellington for two tops-out at £120.

If you are guilty, as I often am, of over-doing it, of trying to cram in too much, then all the more reason to enforce a break. Or, if you are more disciplined and like to concentrate on a select few great works, or simply to stroll reverently about the rooms and halls of these repositories of civilisation’s best, then you deserve a reward. Then again, you may be neither. I would speculate that at least half of the patrons of these restaurants will not be museum-goers, and not have been looking at art at all. They just know a classy place for lunch, and their coin is as good as the most fearsome art-hound’s.

Whatever your motive, forswear the grab-and-go. Do your bit and support the cause: sit down and be served, taste and see. It is not cheap. Nothing is these days. But bring the right spirit and chances are you will get what you pay for. Maybe more.