Hidden in the shadow of supermarkets, shopping centres, and administrative buildings, Le Jardin du Lunch is a Belgian restaurant chain.
When I was a child, my father would take me there for lunch every other Saturday.
At the time, I thought of it as an old-fashioned place. Expectations were modest, the food seemed to compete with what was served in my school canteen, and the atmosphere sometimes felt like a day-care centre for elderly people.
Years later, on an otherwise ordinary day, I came across a Jardin du Lunch again by chance after doing my shopping. I was suddenly overwhelmed by a gentle sense of nostalgia and began to look at this familiar place differently.
What surprised me most was how little it seemed to have changed. The interiors, the furniture, the trays of food, the gestures, and the routines all appeared to belong to another time. Yet the restaurants were still very much alive, attracting a fascinating mixture of generations.
At a time when eating habits are increasingly shaped by takeaway food, delivery services, and rapidly changing trends, Le Jardin du Lunch seems to exist according to its own rhythm. While fast-food chains constantly reinvent themselves and restaurants compete through increasingly elaborate concepts and new culinary experiences, Le Jardin du Lunch persists through something much simpler.
There is something intriguing about this resistance to change. Why do people continue to return to these places? Perhaps they revive memories of lunches from another period of their lives, when meals seemed simpler and were shared around a table. In a culture constantly searching for novelty, these restaurants may offer precisely the opposite: a pause, a return to something familiar, and a reminder that simplicity can sometimes be invaluable.
I began photographing Le Jardin du Lunch in 2022. My intention was not simply to document a disappearing aesthetic or to create an archive of outdated interiors. I wanted to understand the atmosphere of these places and the people who continue to inhabit them.
The photographs focus on the small moments that make up the experience of being there: people eating alone or together, waiting with their trays, talking across tables, passing time, or simply sitting in an environment that seems strangely detached from the world outside.
Through these scenes, Le Jardin du Lunch explores memory, everyday rituals, and the relationship between people and the spaces they repeatedly inhabit. The project looks at how an ordinary restaurant can become a repository for personal and collective memories, and how places that initially appear banal can reveal something about the way we live, age, and remember.
What began with a childhood memory has gradually become an observation of a place suspended between past and present. Le Jardin du Lunch continues to exist within a world that is constantly transforming around it, remaining familiar, modest, and remarkably unchanged.
About Pascal Sgro
Pascal Sgro (1997) is a Belgian photographer based between Brussels and London. He graduated with a Master’s degree in Photography from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels (ARBA-ESA) in 2021.
His work focuses primarily on everyday life, family, food, and the places and rituals that surround them. Through long-term photographic projects, he explores ordinary situations and environments that can easily go unnoticed, often approaching them through personal memories and experiences.
His ongoing projects include Parfum, Le Jardin du Lunch, and Cherry Airlines. In 2024, Le Jardin du Lunch received First Prize at the Brussels Street Photography Festival.
His work has been exhibited at the Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi, Contretype in Brussels, Hangar Photo Art Center, Les Boutographies in Montpellier, as well as in several exhibitions in London and Belgium.
Alongside his documentary practice, Sgro is also interested in the relationship between photography and new image-making technologies. In Cherry Airlines, he explores this relationship by incorporating AI-generated imagery into an analogue photographic process.
He continues to develop his photographic practice between Belgium and the United Kingdom. [Official Website]
