I recently visited Brighton for a few days and I had to visit the Artbox café. It has been on my list for so long and I could not pass up an opportunity to attend this place. Anything Hello Kitty and I am all for it. The café does allow walk-ins but just to be safe we did make a booking in anticipation for a trip. I live about a 2 hour train ride from Brighton, so it’s not like I can just pop down whenever I want to so I did not want to risk turning up on the day and not being able to get a table. There was a £5 charge per person to make a booking, but this was offset against the final bill so it’s not an additional charge.
There is a shop on the ground floor that was very small but very stocked up with all manner of Sanrio characters and products. There is also an ice cream parlour in the shop and they had so many flavours. I would say at least 10, and half of them were vegan! So I was very excited and was very keen to see what other options they had at the actual café. Regarding the actual contents of the shop, for me it was all very cute but nothing practical that I would ever use. Joggers, sweatpants, stickers, keychains, bins, storage cubes, onesies – you name it they most likely had it in a Sanrio colour pallet for the various different characters. The shop was open as a normal shop, so you could just pop in and have a look around if you fancied it which I thought was a nice little touch to the whole experience.
Now we went down during the week, so we visited on a Wednesday. It was therefore pretty quiet and there weren’t many crowds for us to contend with. That being said, the shop is very small and can get very crowded quite quickly. The café is actually located upstairs but you have to wait in the shop before you’re shown to your seat. When we arrived, the shop was quite busy with people just looking around the products, and then also a small group were buying some ice cream from the parlour. All in all there could not be more than 10 of us there, but even then it was quite a squeeze trying to get through. Or to just stand around the store waiting to be seated. Just something to be aware of, especially if you are thinking of going during a busier period.
The upstairs café is very cute. It is decorated with all oft he Sanrio characters you would expect and is all very aesthetically on point with the pastel colours and ultra feminine frills and lace. Very much on brand and was indeed very cute to look at all of the little touches that they gave to it. Clearly a lot of thought went into this and it does show. Even the staff were dressed in very cutesy outfits (whether intentional or not as they didn’t have an actual uniform) which I found to be very charming. I wish pastel colours suited me but alas, I will just have to admire all of the cute outfits and never actually wear them.
The menu was also pretty extensive. They offered savoury meals like curries and sandwiches, as well as sweet treats like sundaes and waffles. We of course had to share, so we ordered the Hello Kitty bagel as our savoury option and then the Hello Kitty chocolate waffle as our sweet treat. When ordering, we were offered the option of having two savoury as our ‘main’ and then the sweet treat would be our ‘dessert’. But the few options we saw on other tables looked so big I don’t think we both could have gotten through two whole meals by ourselves.
The bagel was nice, albeit your basic bagel. It had Quorn ham and vegan cheese, and the bagel was toasted so it was nice and hot to eat. There was also a very cute little Quorn ham bow on the top of the bagel, and a little Hello Kitty face toasted onto the top of the bagel too. It also came with a chopped salad that was very refreshing and a carrot that was shaped and stamped to look like Hello Kitty. It is now the only way I will eat my carrots. Overall, it was a perfectly fine bagel but it was pretty basic. The aesthetic of course is where the main wow factor comes from, since the food itself is pretty standard. Still yummy though and worth a try.
The waffle was huge. I am so glad my husband and I shared this because I think I would have gotten very sick had I tried to eat this whole thing by myself. The waffle was hot, with hot sauce on top and cold ice cream. So altogether it was exactly what you want a waffle to be. It was very sickly though – but again that’s exactly what you want a waffle to be – so I would very much recommend sharing this. It also came with a very cute little Hello Kitty shaped chocolate, which is indeed solid chocolate. It is white chocolate though and I hate white chocolate, so I didn’t try it. Also by the time we had finished the whole waffle, the thought of anymore chocolate nearly put me into a sugar coma so probably best to eat this first if you really wan to try it. From the looks of it though I can only imagine it is a white chocolate treat. The waffle was yummy, but very sickly, and as with the bagel it was your pretty basic waffle.
There is also the option of all kinds of drinks so naturally I went for a milkshake. They use the ice cream from the parlour so the options available for the milkshake were insane. I had to pick two flavours and a sauce, so I went with chocolate and banana ice cream with bubblegum sauce because I have not had bubblegum flavoured anything in so long. In hindsight, the bubblegum may have been a bit overkill because it is horrifically sweet, but the banana ice cream did help tone that sweetness down a little bit. Then again, milkshake plus the waffle was also not a smart idea in terms of my sugar intake.
Overall, this was a very cute little experience. It was fun to see all of the different foods coming out to tables and seeing the attention to detail that was given for the whole experience. The downside I would say though is that it is really expensive. The waffle and the bagel were £9.50 each, which for a café does seem quite high. It is obvious though that the price point is for the experience and to see all of the Sanrio themed details within the entire café and the food. The food itself is pretty average – If this was just your standard café the food would be pretty lack lustre. But the money is clearly for the experience. Would I rush back? No, because as cute as it was it is still a pretty expensive outing. But I would however recommend you go at least once especially if you are a Sanrio fan. I definitely think it is worth a visit as a one off special treat, but I don’t think this is the type of place you go to on a regular basis even if you are a massive Sanrio fan.
Taylor Talks Vegan 