The Free Café is a socially engaged community art project that replaces the direct use of money with large scale cooperative generosity. The Free Café is created for free so that it can serve meals for free. There is no money involved, so that in this place, it cannot form a strain on social status.



The Free Café is a big group of people that donate their time, share their knowledge, use their skills and put in effort to create and run a restaurant for free. It’s this generosity of a community being formed that carries the whole project. Within this open community, knowledge can be gained and spread and skills can be acquired.

For materials and food products we need to only use what others have discarded. We’ve set up a wide network to repurpose fruits and vegetables that have been rejected by farmers and growers and to catch ‘last-minute’ foods at retail. The Free Café opened in November in Groningen in the garden and greenhouse of Tuin in de Stad. Together we built a wooden accomodation where The Free Café offers food and workshops twice a week. Weekly we can serve up to 150 guests a vegan 3-course dinner for free at this point.

We’re dreaming of building an accomodation on the base of recycling completely. Reusing discarded materials like old tyres, wood and furniture, and combining it with local natural products such as loam and straw – to build a place for free that can sustain itself as efficiently as possible in the most environment friendly way.











The Free Café is not an organisation, no charity and not a business, it’s a community where everyone can join.

See the facebook for news and updates: https://www.facebook.com/TheFreeCafe

Website: http://thefreecafe.wix.com/groningen