Instagram Food Culture And The Death Of Mise En Place
The first time I felt old in my own kitchen, no one shouted at me. No one threw a pan. I got framed. A kid leaned over my board, angled his phone, and called my half-cut onions “vibey content for instagram food culture.” I stood there with a knife in my hand and realised the room now served two services. One for guests. One for the feed.
Back when I started, no one gave a shit what the pass looked like from a bird’s-eye view. The only view that mattered sat on a bar stool with a schooner and a rumpled menu. Mise en place ruled the room. Tubs lined up. Labels straight. Onions cut the same size so they sweated at the same rate. You learned order first, ego later. In Sydney, Brisbane, little coastal pubs, it was the same rhythm. Dice, sear, taste, correct. No one asked for overhead shots of their cutting board.
The smell was the thing. Cold room metal on your fingers at five in the morning. Onions hitting hot oil. Beef bones catching on the bottom of a pot before the water went in. The quiet hour when you lined up hotel pans of chopped garlic, soft herbs, batons of carrot, and you knew the whole day would live or die on those trays. A good chef could walk past your station and sense if service would sink by looking at your bench for three seconds. No filters. No captions. Only the truth of your prep.
There was this staff meal once. Nothing fancy. Chicken frames, leftover veg, rice from lunch. We turned it into a sort of poor man’s congee, thick and smoky, with spring onion and a slosh of soy. The bowl looked like beige sludge. No height. No “pop of colour.” It hugged every tired body in that tiny back room behind a milk bar in Melbourne. If instagram food culture had been in the room, it would have scrolled past that pot without a second glance. The dish did not care. It did its job.
Then the phones multiplied. At first it felt harmless. A quick snap at the pass. A boomerang of a flambé. Then plates started holding for angles. Hot chips sagged while someone hunted for “better light.” Prawns cooled while a junior adjusted micro herbs for a shot they would upload to a grid full of the same fake spontaneity. Service slowed, but likes climbed. A diner might send a steak back for being lukewarm while the kitchen high-fived over a reel that hit twenty thousand views.
You feel it most on the line when the ticket machine spits longer than your breath. You call for all mains on table eight, and one of the young guns half-hears you because they are lining up three plates for a top-down video. They plate to the lens now. Negative space on the rim. Extra smear of puree “for contrast.” You taste the plate and the seasoning drifts because their focus sits inside a screen. instagram food culture turned layout into a performance and pushed flavour into the background.
How instagram food culture warped the line
In Australia, we already lean hard into looks. Beach bodies. Cafe interiors built for one wide shot across terrazzo and eucalyptus. Now the kitchen wears the same pressure. Owners talk about “shareable moments” more than seasoning. I sat in a meeting where a consultant used the phrase “content pipeline” about a breakfast menu. I wanted to walk out, grab a meat pie from the servo next door, and eat it in the car where no one would photograph the thing.
Do not get me wrong, I am not a saint of the old school. I have chased the shot. I have told a commis to hold a plate at the pass for a full minute so the marketing girl from head office could get her angle. I have watched a perfect billowy pavlova sag while someone circled it with a phone. Every time I did it, something in me felt off, like I had left the stove on in an empty house. I sold out my own mise en place to feed the algorithm.
The part that hurts is what the new kids miss. They grow up inside instagram food culture, so they think the story starts at the pass. They see finished plates with slow-motion sauce pours, not the dead prawns in the bin from a mismanaged fridge, not the burns from reaching into a too-hot oven without a dry side towel. They chase the surface. Flash-fried snacks with neon garnishes, clout burgers stacked so high no one can fit a bite in their mouth without dislocating something. The old discipline looks boring on a screen, so they treat it like an optional extra.
I keep thinking about those quiet trays of chopped onion. The discipline of repeating the same cut until your fingers move without drama. The readiness when ten tables walk in from the pokies room at once. A tight mise saves your arse before your ideas do. instagram food culture swapped that out for a story about “creativity” that skips the dull, hard parts. The parts where you show up on Monday, hung over from Sunday staff drinks, and still line up your tubs because people will eat your food in two hours.
In my own kitchen now, I draw a line. Phones stay in the locker during prep. You want to post plates after service, fine, knock yourself out. During the rush, we chase heat, not exposure. I tell the apprentices that no one on the internet will taste their food. The diner at table twelve will. The nurse who worked a double shift. The bloke who lost his job and spent his last fifty bucks on date night in our dining room. They do not care about your overhead shot. They care if the fish skin snaps when their fork hits it.
The world will keep feeding instagram food culture. There will be new filters, new trends, more staged overhead shots of brunch boards in Bondi. I am not here to fight phones. I am here to protect the old gods of the line. The sharp knife. The quiet bench. The tray of onions cut small and even. The truth lives there. No likes. No tags. Only whether the plate lands hot, seasoned, and right.
