Daniel Farrow: The Fire and the Flood

The Fire and the Flood, 2025, oil on canvas, 59 x 39 in

By KATE HOAG May 30, 2025

Artist Daniel Farrow hasn’t watched The Bear. He doesn’t need to. “One of the most common questions I get asked is, have you seen The Bear? And I haven’t. But I kind of get what it’s about. I’ve lived it.”

He’s not exaggerating. Before he was showing paintings at Bantof in London, Farrow was running a restaurant while managing an addiction to alcohol and cocaine. “COVID happened as I was opening my restaurant…it was like the perfect storm.”

To make it through the storm, Farrow began to, as he puts it, “paint again, very impulsively,” adding that it “became sort of the guiding light.”

That light led to Reflections from the Restaurant, his latest exhibition at Bantof Restaurant in Soho, which looks back at the restaurant life that nearly broke him and how he put himself back together.

“This series is the full stop. It’s the end of a chapter,” he explains. “It’s a sort of catharsis. Therapeutic. About letting go.”

Lemons & 'Lines', 2025, oil on cotton

Farrow’s process is far from traditional. “I’m not particularly conscious when I’m creating the work.” Case in point is one of Farrow’s paintings is called The Fire and the Flood. When creating the work, Farrow notes that he “set that piece on fire and attacked it with a garden rake.”

And yet, it’s his favorite. “It tells such a story of the restaurant. It looks burnt, but it also looks wet and flooded. For me, it just perfectly represents that whole period of time.”

What makes Reflections from the Restaurant so powerful is how personal it is, not just in the themes, but in the way it came to be. “I caught myself in the mirror in the hotel,” he says, remembering a recent trip to Italy. “And I looked at the version of myself from the restaurant, from the grief and turmoil. And I knew I was leaving him behind.” He wrote in the sand: Thank you, Daniel.

That kind of emotional honesty runs through all of his work, which has resonated with viewers. Farrow notes that at his last show: “A good handful of grown men in tears at the exhibition.You know, people you wouldn’t normally expect to publicly weep.”

Reflections from the Restaurant, 2025, oil on canvas

Farrow notes that although he did not expect this type of reaction or intend to achieve that sort of reaction with the work, he said that it was moving to see people “find the space within themselves in the exhibition to reveal that part of themselves openly and authentically, and then maybe actually address some of those things.”

Farrow’s not interested in making work just for show. He makes it to understand himself and maybe help others do the same. “Each work of art is a piece of the puzzle. It’s me putting it together to create sort of a whole self again.”

And he’s just getting started. His next exhibition, already in the works, is titled Why Do We Gift Flowers In The Knowledge They Will Inevitably Die? and might even come with short films. “There’s a reclamation of everything I wanted to do and be when I was younger,” he says.

He admits his ideas can be a lot to wrangle. “It’s a bit like when they release a thousand balloons into the air and you’re reaching for them.” But sobriety has brought focus. “With the mental clarity I have now, it’s easier to maybe grasp onto one or two and focus on moving forward.”

Compared to the tight structure of the restaurant world, Farrow sees art as something much freer. “There’s something quite uniform about a restaurant. It’s a presentation. It’s a brand. This is what the food is going to be like. And then there has to be a routine, steps and processes to create something uniform and consistent.”

'Torn' reimagined, 2025, oil on card

He adds, “Sometimes it’s to a sort of almost military degree, whereas the art world is removing the ceiling. You’re kind of at sea. And the opportunity is infinite.”

It’s not that restaurants lacked creativity, in fact he was drawn to them for that very reason. “It makes sense why I was drawn toward opening a restaurant, becoming a chef, and cooking—it is a creative outlet.” But ultimately, he says, “There’s less of a cap on art.”

Despite their differences, Farrow sees a shared emotional core in both worlds. “Both can be so deeply personal. A passionate chef who has honed their craft probably has the same thoughts and feelings about their output as an artist does.”

Still, for Farrow, art offers something restaurants couldn’t. “As I said, the ceiling has been removed.”

If Reflections from the Restaurant was the fire, everything coming next is the bloom.

To learn more about Daniel Farrow and his upcoming exhibitions, please visit his website here and follow him on Instagram @danielfarrow_