Salon du Chat returns to Electric Picnic this August back in the Mindfield Arena with a full weekend of conversation, free coffee, and rice krispie buns for anyone who sits down.

What actually is Salon du Chat?

If you’ve never come across it before: it’s a pop-up conversation café. Instead of ordering food, you order a topic off our menu and sit down with someone you’ve never met. You get past the “so, what do you do” bit, forget to check your phone, and probably end up mid-debate with a total stranger about the eclipse, the endless adaptations of adaptations in films, or something you didn’t know you had an opinion on until thirty seconds ago. That’s pretty much it!

This year, we’re looking at the times

Every year Salon du Chat runs on a theme, and this year it’s time. Epecifically, how unreliable it is.

Here’s the thing about time: it lies to you constantly. Forty-five minutes with someone brilliant feels like five. Five minutes in a festival queue feels like forty-five. Electric Picnic itself is a masterclass in time doing whatever it wants. Three days that somehow contain a week’s worth of stories, a schedule you meant to follow, and at least one hour spent looking for your friends that felt considerably longer.

This year’s menu leans into that: a set of topics built around the past, the present, and whatever’s coming next, designed to slow things down for a bit in the middle of a very fast weekend.

Why we keep doing this

Genuine conversation is getting rarer, and rarer things are worth protecting a little pocket of space for! People spend three days at a festival surrounded by thousands of others and can still leave feeling like they didn’t really connect with anyone. Salon du Chat exists to interrupt that. To give two strangers forty-five minutes and a good question, and see what happens.

Every year, people come back. Every year, someone tells us it was the best part of their weekend, better than the headliner, better than the food trucks. Every year, we get slightly obsessed with the idea all over again.

Find us

Mindfield Arena, Friday to Sunday, 11am–12.30pm.

Pick a topic, sit down, and see where it goes.