In the swanky Manchester restaurant Cut & Craft, hosts have had to enforce a new set of rules. No ring lights are allowed in the dining room, and there is a 10-minute time limit on visits to the toilet – because influencers were taking too long conducting photoshoots in the bathrooms.
The restaurateurs behind the New York-inspired steakhouse might only have themselves to blame: they’ve built the washrooms as palaces of opulence, all gilded and mirrored, elaborate sinks and gorgeous lighting (done, admittedly with Instagram in mind). But they didn’t expect diners to turn up with suitcases of shoes and hair straighteners.
“We have these bonkers, gorgeous toilets,” Georgina Pellant, marketing manager, tells The i Paper. “They’re a dream selfie [backdrop]. So girls moved from taking selfies on the restaurant floor to the bathroom. But people were in there for so long that their food had gone cold.”
While she acknowledges they designed the bathrooms to look good for a photograph they didn’t realise people would take it this far. “It’s great that people want to take pictures, we want people to have a lovely time, but there’s maybe a certain way to conduct yourself in public”.
Pellant explains they’ve had female customers turn up with “huge bags of makeup, suitcases of clothes, hair straighteners, ring lights, and lots of shoes. They order food but then go down to the bathrooms and set up their own personal dressing rooms”.
Top social media influencers can earn a huge amount of money by visiting restaurants and creating content. As well as generating publicity for the restaurant itself. Recently, one anonymous influencer contacted a London restaurant pop-up, via their agent of course, to offer their services — a five-minute video on Instagram — for £30,000. The team had to decline.
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Last week, restaurateur Jeremy King, who co-founded the likes of Le Caprice and The Ivy, and now operates London hotspots Arlington and The Park, described the boom in influencers as an “influenza-like outbreak” on the hospitality scene. “We started to notice guests coming in with what appeared to be the sole purpose of taking and posting fashion photographs, using the restaurant as a background,” he said. “When I remonstrated with one particularly entitled woman, she told me that she could do whatever she wanted because it was a public place and that I should be grateful for her shooting footage…”
Photographs are undeniably part of the modern dining landscape, one that started to shift with the evolution of camera phones. Anyone under the age of 40 is probably going to snap a photo of their dinner before eating it these days — it’s part of the restaurant experience, a technological amuse bouche. But lighting rigs and tripods? A full costume change? Not getting round to eating the food because it’s gone cold? That’s a different league.
Andy Beynon, chef-owner of the Michelin-starred restaurant Behind, explains: “We’ve had a few influencers come in and set up full lighting rigs. Or they’ll come in on their own [as a solo diner] and erect a tripod and talk to their camera as if they’re dining with someone else. They’ll be really over the top, which feels awkward. I’ve seen one or two pretend to cry.
“The way I operate my restaurant is with a horseshoe table around the kitchen, so everyone eats at the same time. I introduce the dishes and talk to people. When an influencer is doing a piece to camera while this is happening, it’s quite bizarre. I respect what a lot of influencers do and I support the ones who genuinely care about and love food, but some of them are really odd and disruptive,” he says.
Tom Middleton Joseph, the director at Peckham restaurant Hausu, has witnessed something similar: “[When they book] they ask for good lighting, and then they act like they’re eating with someone else [when alone]. It’s quite funny.”
Such is the impact of said influencers on the restaurant floor, some restaurateurs have installed designated areas for them. Their marketing power is unquestionable — businesses want them for the publicity. But that’s not to say a balancing act isn’t needed.
“I see lighting go up quite a lot,” says Adam Handling, who owns the two Michelin-starred Frog in London and one-star Ugly Butterfly in Cornwall. “I’ve always found it weird, but they are paying and they make my food look great, so I’m okay with it… but they do get seated away from other guests. We do research on all guests beforehand. If ‘influencer’ flags up, we do the seating plan accordingly.”
Lighting and tripods aside, far stranger things have happened in the world of content creation. One hospitality worker, Anna Robinson, says she saw one well known influencer suffer an allergic reaction while eating a standout dish, but declined assistance to ensure they got the perfect video reel finished. “The show must go on,” she says. Frances Cottrell-Duffield, who looks after publicity for numerous high-profile British restaurants, recalls influencers being served a dish only to stand up, take it outside, and begin taking photos on the pavement.
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Chef Pavel Baranovs at Kino says, “[There was] a raucous, bottomless influencer brunch at a restaurant where I used to work. The influencers came charging in, ready to party, completely skipped the food before diving headfirst into drinks. A few hours in, their social media feeds were a disaster zone with jumbled posts, spelling mistakes, over-the-top selfies — all while they could barely stand. Things escalated when one collapsed in front of the kitchen and dozed off. We managed to rouse her and she insisted we should have known about her Prosecco allergy! It was one of the most unforgettable and outrageous moments I’ve ever experienced!”
Another chef says: “I once had an influencer book at the last-minute [24 hours before] for a tasting menu. His guest was vegan, so we prepared a full vegan set menu to accommodate. The day of the meal, he cancelled because he got tickets to Oasis…”
As more restaurants start to ban phones altogether, from Punk Royale to the French House, Endo at Annabel’s to — probably — Simpsons in the Strand, perhaps the era of the influencer will start to adapt. But it begs the question, if we didn’t document dinner, did we eat at all?
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