I can’t remember exactly when I first saw a restaurant snack perched on top of a square of geometrically branded grease paper, but I do remember thinking it looked cool. The dish was almost certainly something dusted with a cricket pitch of fine brunoise chives, and the grass-green speckles of allium would have looked punchy and pretty on my Instagram stories, contrasting with the bold, primary-coloured font of whatever restaurant had served it up.
What I do know, however, is that I’d be happy if I never saw it again. What began as a cute accessory now feels like I’m eating directly off someone’s marketing strategy. It’s hard to shake the sense that dishes presented this way are designed more for word of mouth than for an actual mouth.
Plating food to look good is nothing new but for several years it has felt like restaurants are shelling out for consultants and external agencies, or even employing in-house creative directors, to make sure that their food is more than just visually attractive when it arrives at your table.
“Virality”, “shareability”, food that is famous on #restauranttok, all seem to be becoming as important as the real life experience of enjoying a meal.
It’s understandable when you look at the data that shows how much social media is influencing our restaurant choices. According to research by booking platform OpenTable, 87 per cent of customers say they have visited a restaurant because they found it on social media, and one in five Australians admits to booking a restaurant just so they can post about it. One third even say they made a decision to dine at a certain venue purely to eat a dish that they’ve seen online. Social media has become more than just a way to connect to customers; it has become a non-negotiable marketing tool. “If you don’t have a really on-point social presence, you’re missing out on a major opportunity,” says Sophie McComas-Williams, director and co-founder of Buffet, a creative agency that designs content for many of Australia’s top restaurants including Brisbane’s Agnes, Sydney’s Fabbrica, Ragazzi and Icebergs Dining Room and Bar.
But what happens when a restaurant’s digital experience outperforms the physical one? Where it becomes impossible to open a new venue without hooking the launch to a new “cool retro take on [insert fast food burger or servo ice-cream here]” or a snack that’s covered in hundreds and thousands or Fanta-bright salmon roe, just so it pops on the ’gram? Where gimmicky tableside theatre – dessert trolleys, flamboyant cocktails, caviar bumps – seem fun at first but over time begin to feel more about content than cuisine. There are few things more disappointing than being seduced by a good-looking dish online, only to find that the restaurant doesn’t live up to its digital promise. A tasteless snack is still a tasteless snack, even if it gets showered by a hundred fire emojis online.
“There have been a couple of instances this year, where restaurants that looked fantastic online have shut up shop, and I’m sure if you were only following them on social, you would have been surprised by the news,” shares one professional eater. “But if you’d actually been and experienced them firsthand, the news just wasn’t that surprising.”
It’s easy to see why restaurants can be tempted to put a large chunk of their energy and resources towards their social media presence, to the potential detriment of their IRL experience, particularly smaller operators who are desperate to grab the attention of an increasingly spend-shy consumer in a punishing economy. Sending a dish into virtual virality is almost an iron-clad guarantee that you’ll be booked out, at least in the short term. In 2021, New York steakhouse Skirt Steak was forced to hire extra staff when their steak frites went viral on TikTok, according to the website Food Republic. The Parisian bakery responsible for social media’s latest pastry obsession, the cringily named “crookie”, now has queues around the block as standard.
@jacksdiningroom Trying the first ever viral cookie croissant from the place that invented it at Boulangerie Louvard in Paris #paris #croissant #cookie #dessert #cookiecroissant #parispastry #pastries #cookiedough #croissants #parisfood #viralfood #jacksdiningroom #chocolatechipcookies #cookies #frenchpastry #pastry
A viral dish can also backfire. A restaurant that’s packed full of clout-chasers photographing a hit dish rather than eating it can feel soulless and off-putting for other diners. In other instances, that big-hitter dish may not be something the restaurant can practically sustain. “We had one client who was doing an amazing crab dish that performed really, really well on social media but they decided they wanted to take it off the menu,” says McComas-Williams. “They said, ‘We don’t want to be known as ‘the crab restaurant’.” Part of the consideration was that crab is expensive and inconsistently available, which meant they risked disappointing diners who had come to the restaurant purely to try it, only to find it wasn’t on the menu. Rather than shackle themselves to it forever, they canned the crab.
There are other ways that restaurants can use their social media to encourage customers to keep coming through the doors, even in a perilous economy. Restaurants such as Chae in Melbourne use their Instagram feed to highlight ingredients and techniques, rather than spotlighting flashy influencer bait. Almost every second or third post on Instagram account for Melbourne wine bar Bahama Gold serves up practical information, such as public holiday opening hours or details about one-off events, making it what its business development and beverage manager Gus Gluck calls a “community noticeboard” rather than an obvious marketing tool.
The Instagram accounts of Byron Bay’s Bar Heather and Melbourne’s Poodle Bar & Bistro each have a cool, confident focus that don’t feel like they’re courting likes or shares, and the real life experience of dining in both feels equally self-assured. In Bangkok, chef Supaksorn “Ice” Jongsiri from fine-diner Sorn says that he rarely posts dishes from his restaurant online, preferring his social media to focus on the unsung producers who are the backbone of his Southern Thai cooking. When you see a dish on a screen, he says, “it can take away some of the good experience. It can take away your appreciation. It’s like when you want to go to a movie but you see the trailer first, and then the trailer gives away everything.” Sorn is booked out year-round.
As restaurant-goers, we may be starting to crave less short-term flash and more long-term groundedness from our restaurants. Buffet’s McComas-Williams says that she’s starting to notice an emerging trend where people want to see restaurant content that’s approachable and authentic, rather than cynically cartwheeling for attention. “Audiences don’t always want to see 100 per cent polished, beautiful press pics,” she says. “They want to see behind-the-scenes, on-the-fly stuff, shot on an iPhone.” Perhaps this is a digital reflection of the sorts of restaurants that most of us actually like to dine in; ones that feel like they’re built with genuine care and honesty, rather than designed on a marketer’s spreadsheet.
If they’re lucky, a restaurant can have its cake (or toast) and eat it too; finding themselves with all the perks of a viral dish, but one that doesn’t become so outsized that it overshadows everything else the venue offers. The taramasalata shokupan toast at Baba’s Place in Sydney’s Marrickville was an accidental online hit from the moment the restaurant opened in 2021. There’s something about its neat, square form, squiggle of piped pastel roe and thatching of emerald-green cucumbers that is catnip to an iPhone lens.
“There was a moment early on where people would come in and just order heaps of tarama [to photograph],” says director and co-owner Jean-Paul El Tom. “One tarama between two people is more than enough but we’d get people ordering four between two. I was like, huh.” Visual virality was never El Tom’s intention when he created the dish (it is simply a restaurant version of an after-school snack he used to eat as a kid) but he was diplomatic about it, despite his occasional urge to shuffle it quietly off the menu. “People come into restaurants for different reasons,” he says. “Some people come in to take photographs. Who am I to judge?”
But over time, as the restaurant has matured, El Tom is pleased to see that the excessive tarama orders have died down, and he’s watched as his customers have connected more deeply with Baba’s broader menu. “When you first come into the restaurant, the tarama sticks out among the dishes,” El Tom explains. “But then when you sit down to eat, it sort of behaves itself and gets back into line.”
“From a visual and flavour perspective, all the other dishes sing as well.”
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
