coffee and cakes
Theatre slang for a paltry, barely-worth-it salary — the kind of pay that covers little more than snacks.
Definitions
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.
Comments
(theatre, slang) A meagre salary.
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Semantically related
- coffee and cake79%
(slang, sometimes, attributive) A trivial amount of money; peanuts.
- coffee-and72%
A dated British slang adjective meaning cheap, inferior, or second-rate — the kind of low-budget, corner-cutting experience you'd associate with a greasy spoon serving weak coffee and whatever biscuit is on the plate. The phrase evokes the imagery of a minimal, mediocre offering: just coffee and something uninspired alongside it. Rarely heard today outside of historical British writing, but still an evocative way to describe something that's technically there but entirely underwhelming.
- coffee-and68%
(slang, derogatory) Cheap, second-rate.
- coffee money67%
(Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, idiomatic, politics) A small amount of money given as a bribe or gratuity.