How Instagram Is Transforming Professional Cooking

Your followers aren't the only ones checking out your perfectly composed food porn.
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Dining has reached its Instagram era, when a camera is as central to the experience as a fork and anyone with a decent eye is making magazine-quality photos of food.

People have always loved eating, and photographers have long recognized the inherent beauty of food. But smartphones with pin-sharp lenses and apps that make editing as easy as swiping and tapping turn anyone into a food photographer. There are more than 178 million photos tagged #food on Instagram and 56 million tagged #foodporn. People are obsessed with photographing what they eat, something professional chefs are catering to—and learning from.

“It’s all about exposure,” says Dominique Crenn of Atelier Crenn in San Francisco. Crenn, who was among the chefs I interviewed at the Terroir Hospitality symposium in Toronto, is the first woman in the US to earn two Michelin stars. “Instagram came to give a voice to chefs and to the food they serve.”

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Chefs are embracing this in a big way. A shot of a new dish posted to their own accounts, or a diner’s, can cause reservations to spike. Stunning dishes, daring ingredients and thoughtful presentations add to the experience, and encourage people to post post post photos on their social media accounts.

Of course, chefs don’t set out to create viral dishes, and others abhor the very idea of it. More than a few chefs ban cameras from their dining rooms, as French chef Alexandre Gauthier did last year at La Grenouillère. But many others are well aware of the power of social media, and embrace it. “I’ll be honest. If I have a better looking dish, I give that one to the people taking photos,” says Benedict Reade, the former chef at Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen who recently opened a pop-up restaurant in Scotland.

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Instagram and social media are word-of-mouth marketing for the digital era, and can help build a chef’s rep and clientele—as long as the photos don’t suck. “It affects me when I see a bad review,” says chef Ned Bell of the Four Seasons Hotel in Vancouver. “But it affects me more when someone takes a bad photo of my food. I worry about what my food looks like on the social media world.”

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The intense focus on getting it just right goes beyond plating to the entire experience, from the menu to the décor. People photograph everything, and post it all. “Chefs worry about this stuff,” says chef Eric Werner of Hartwood in Tulum, Mexico, and designers are putting “more emphasis on less cooking areas and more plating spaces.”

But Crenn says there is “a thin line between annoying dinners and exposure.” Many chefs loathe patrons who approach their meal as if it were a photo shoot and try to meticulously stage a scene, often to the detriment of the food—and occasionally other patrons. It’s not uncommon to see patrons futzing with a camera or trying to frame a shot as their dish goes cold. “What really annoys me is when people Instagram live,” Reade says. “When I’m serving someone’s food and put a beautiful hot plate on the table but they are so concerned to post and food gets cold because they are trying to find the perfect caption before they eat the fucking food. Do you know how much I sweated to make the food the right temperature for you? Are you here to show off to your friends?”

Besides being a marketing resource, Instagram is a helpful research tool. Many chefs have accounts, of course — Crenn has more than 12,000 followers, celebrity chef Bobby Flay has 10 times that many, while Jamie Oliver has some 2.8 million. They watch each other, drawing inspiration and ideas.

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“Instagram makes trends. Everybody draws a line of sauce in the same way. Because one chef sees it, another sees it,” says chef Anthony Walsh of Olivier & Bonacini. “Before you had to go to a restaurant to see and taste a dish. Now you can see dishes, how they make it.”

Chef Jair Tellez from MeroToro in Mexico City readily admits to doing this himself.

“I like to check from time to time,” he says. “What is Rene Redzepi doing at Noma or Inaki Aizpitarte from Le Chateaubriand? If I like the color scheme, technique, plate or combination of ingredients, I can duplicate it in my own kitchen. It’s about sharing ideas. Before there were cookbooks, now it’s more accessible.”

Of course, there’s a risk diners—and perhaps chefs—will favor big, beautiful dishes that may be, if not boring, then mundane. “People put so much emphasis on the way a plate looks,” Reade says. “The most delicious things don’t look that good.” It’s a valid point. A good mushroom soup is a wonderful thing, but not terribly attractive. As in all things, balance is key. The best chefs realize the food comes first, but it isn’t lost on them that appearance is, to many diners, as important as flavor.

“Chefs are artists. We try and build the plate to make it look beautiful,” Bell says. “Do I think about the camera when I create a dish? No. But if it looks good, I’ll even take a photo.”

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