I was at a restaurant in Collingwood recently. Nice place. Creative menu. The couple next to us spent approximately fifteen minutes photographing their entrees from every possible angle before eating. The food was cold by the time they took a bite.

This is not a new observation. People have been complaining about phone-eating for years. But the deeper problem isn’t individual behaviour. It’s how the pressure to be photographed has fundamentally changed what restaurants create, how menus are designed, and what we value about dining.

The visual arms race

Restaurants now design dishes to be photographed. This isn’t speculation — chefs and restaurant designers talk about it openly. The height of a dish, the contrast of colours on the plate, the vessel it’s served in, even the table surface it sits on: all optimised for the phone camera.

A chef friend in Fitzroy told me she spends more time thinking about how a dish will photograph than how it tastes. She hates that this is true, but it’s the reality. A visually stunning dish that goes viral on Instagram can fill tables for months. A delicious but visually unremarkable dish gets ignored.

The result is a food culture that increasingly prioritises spectacle over substance. Dishes that are unnecessarily tall. Unnecessary smoke. Edible flowers that add nothing to flavour. Neon-coloured sauces chosen for contrast rather than taste.

The menu problem

The Instagram effect hasn’t just changed how dishes look. It’s changed which dishes get served.

Stews, curries, braises — the foods that are often the most delicious in any cuisine — are inherently unphotogenic. They’re brown. They’re lumpy. They don’t stack. They don’t cascade artfully off a spoon. So they get pushed off menus in favour of things that stack, drip, and pose.

This is particularly damaging for cuisines where the best dishes happen to be visually humble. Malaysian rendang, Japanese curry rice, Ethiopian wot, Italian ragu — these are some of the greatest dishes ever created, and they all look like various shades of brown in a bowl.

When restaurants chase Instagram over flavour, these dishes disappear from menus or get “elevated” (dressed up with unnecessary garnishes and plating techniques that change nothing about the eating experience).

The diner problem

I’m not going to pretend I haven’t taken a photo of my food. I have. But there’s a difference between snapping a quick photo and turning every meal into a content creation session.

What I’ve noticed is that the photographing habit changes how people experience food. When you’re thinking about the image, you’re not paying attention to the aroma, the first bite, the way the dish unfolds as you eat. You’re in broadcast mode, not experience mode.

I’ve started leaving my phone in my bag at restaurants. It’s made a measurable difference in how much I enjoy the meal. It’s a small, slightly ridiculous act of resistance, but it works.

What about the restaurants that benefit

I should acknowledge the other side. Instagram has been genuinely transformative for small, independent restaurants that can’t afford traditional marketing. A great photo shared by the right food blogger can generate months of bookings. For new restaurants without marketing budgets, it’s been a lifeline.

And some restaurants use visual appeal as a complement to great food, not a substitute. There’s nothing wrong with food that looks beautiful and tastes exceptional. The problem is when the visual becomes the primary consideration.

The review conundrum

Instagram has also blurred the line between amateur food photography and restaurant criticism. The most influential “food reviewers” on social media are often people with photography skills and large followings, not people with deep food knowledge or critical frameworks.

The result is a review ecosystem that rewards visual impact over culinary quality. A photogenic dessert at a mediocre restaurant might get more attention than an extraordinary but camera-shy dish at a brilliant one.

This matters because consumer choices follow attention. The restaurants that photograph well get the bookings. The ones doing quiet, excellent, unphotogenic work get overlooked.

Where I land

I’m not anti-technology. I’m not calling for everyone to delete Instagram. But I think we’ve lost something when the visual representation of food becomes more important than the food itself.

The next time you’re at a restaurant, try eating first and photographing later. Or not photographing at all. Notice what you taste when you’re actually paying attention. The food might surprise you.