Theatre slang for a paltry, barely-worth-it salary — the kind of pay that covers little more than snacks. If an actor describes their wages as 'coffee and cakes,' they're being wryly self-deprecating about the gap between artistic passion and financial reward. The phrase captures the well-known reality of life in the performing arts: huge effort, great experience, terrible money. It's used with weary humour rather than genuine bitterness, and belongs to the long tradition of theatre folk laughing at their own financial predicament.
She'd been in three West End productions and was still earning what she called coffee and cakes — enough to survive, barely.
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Regional slang from around the English-speaking world — British, Australian, Irish, Caribbean, Nigerian, Filipino, AAVE, and the hyphenated-English dialects that make the internet sound local.
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(theatre, slang) A meagre salary.
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