All views expressed are that of the writer.

As a very-online thirty-five year old woman, this year I watched helplessly as the tide of my Instagram Explore page turned from something that could be called ‘exploratory’, geared toward going out, to tradwives. I rarely go out, it’s true. First came lockdown, then a hermitic pregnancy. People advised I should visit as many chic restaurants as possible while I could. Instead I was plagued by prolonged nausea which I only survived thanks to salty snacks, full of E numbers my body wouldn’t register as food. The demands of a newborn then meant a freezer full of batch-cooked meals, and now I have a (delicious) toddler whose leftovers I eat from the floor. Of the many ways parenthood has altered me, one is a new understanding of what ‘living in the moment’ means, another is that ‘the moment’ is spent at home.

Perhaps it’s for the best that my Explore page reflects this new domesticated reality, though I still follow enough restaurants to live vicariously once the toddler’s asleep. I hope that by stubbornly engaging with their content, I might stem the flow of nursery decor and cleaning products the algorithm feeds me in favour of worldlier fare. Brutto, a restaurant in London, posts not only tantalising plates of Pici and 1kg bistecca, but their daily service reports. These combine the prosaic (‘88 booked, 57 walked in’) with the sublime (‘Folks were up for anything and everything … the entire room felt like they were at some exclusive supper club and were completely won over by the music’ ‘Faves Lindsay & Hilton held court on 34’). Reading them is like watching Match of the Day – you soon feel as if you were there. Collapsing into bed by nine, I enter a parallel universe, studying their list for walk-in solo diners and imagining myself as one; mysterious, footloose, eating food someone else has prepared. Online I am privy to a view of the bar from behind-the-scenes, even if only as a prelude to the more accessible luxury of sleep.

Booking a babysitter and restaurant table now represents the ultimate indulgent fantasy for me, not least due to how much each costs. And yet, as with most fantasies, reality doesn’t necessarily satisfy desire. I remember being told, pre smartphones and online reviews, how to distinguish between good and bad restaurants abroad by those which had photos in the menu. Photo-menus meant tourists, who wanted to know what to expect when ordering in a foreign land, and tourists meant the experience was ‘inauthentic’, tasteless in both senses of the word. But now we expect the best, even the most ‘authentic’ restaurants’ to have a higher res version of photo menus to lure diners in online. Many diners provide free marketing by tagging them, in exchange for social or cultural capital in their own curated feeds.

Visual culture has always been part of restaurant culture, as the origins of places like Rochelle Canteen, and the River Cafe show. But popular taste in restaurants seems to have shifted to favour the visual aesthetic they convey online — at the expense of the sensory experience of actually being there. Interiors are now designed not just with Instagram and TikTok in mind, but to look their best in these digital spaces. Perhaps it started with gimmicks like Bob Bob Ricard, which in 2009 became known for the Wes Anderson-kitsch champagne buttons at every table – literal clickbait. In 2014, David Shrigley transformed Sketch’s decadent Gallery restaurant millennial pink and it was genuinely fun to look around. But things are getting silly, the po-faced parent in me now thinks. Channeling a ‘White Lotus’ version of Sicily, I ate at Circulo Popolare last year, where diners flock for its mafia wife aesthetic. I was bemused. Online it appeared like an intimate, glittering cave. In person it was like a shopping mall Santa’s grotto. A line of adult-kids waited for a chance to sit in this hysterical sensory-overload. Feasting their eyes on the ‘authentic’ knick-knacks on the wall, made absurd by the vast, airport-proportions of the room. Even the bowls were too big for the food, the chairs too low for the table, making it all feel fake. Clearly this works well on our feeds — it’s one of the most grammed restaurants in the country I am told.

Whether maximalist spectacle or minimalist restraint, entering these kinds of spaces after the virtual tour feels like arriving on a film set as an extra or even prop, the background for someone else’s candid at best, at worst a niche starter-pack meme for a parody account about gen Z taste.

My cousin, who has worked in numerous au courant restaurants in the UK and Scandinavia, laments the double-bind social media has these businesses in, as it does most industries. Independent restaurants especially rely on an online presence, not having the dedicated PR teams that larger restaurant groups have, but then risk becoming victims of their own success. As a waitress, she recalls watching lone influencers curate their empty tablescape, accenting with a single bread basket and the restaurant’s signature glass of muscat and olives. Usually they would leave without eating any of it, interested solely in a more abstract category of taste. Most restaurants can’t survive on such a meagre diet, but venues that ban photos do little to deter the people taking them, and if they stopped taking them, then what would I have to scroll through in bed? Property porn I guess.

The fantasy, my cousin says, conceals not only the reality of what is interesting about the food itself, such as where it comes from or how it’s made, but the unglamorous economic realities of the restaurant industry in the UK generally, such as the zero hours contracts, low wages, antisocial hours and sexual harassment. In that sense at least, the staging of social media content is an apt metaphor for a hospitality industry that relies on surface image and exploitation beneath.

I’m often left feeling empty by the ambient self-consciousness of such social-media optimised places, even when the food is good. And of course, it’s not always meant to be. For some restaurants, signature dishes act as marketing gimmicks in the vein of Nathan Fielder’s poo-flavoured frozen-yoghurt, and going viral on TikTok is the beginning and end of their strategy to survive in an increasingly dire economic climate. A study last summer found restaurant-goers were eating out less often and spending less when they did, but were willing to pay £28 more at venues that ‘look good on the gram’. Nearly half of those polled believed an active online presence to be the best way to judge if a restaurant is worth visiting.

For our recent anniversary, my partner booked somewhere that had been open only a week. I’d followed the restaurant online since long before that, admiring the aesthetic mood boards guiding their ongoing renovation. On entering, I noted an influencer who I follow finishing up at the table we were about to be seated at. As her husband waited, she took one last photo of the decadently disordered plates. Taking their place, I knew that if I checked her page I would see the scene I now sat before, rendered more tasteful through her POV, captioned with something about how special it was, how important it was to make time for date night. I refrained, determined to remain ‘in the moment’, but already the evening had entered the disorienting split-screen so common to such hyped places, where we simultaneously feel like a guest and a ghost, floating above ourselves.