Restaurants are cracking down on diners taking pictures of their plates. According to a Jan. 25 report by ABC News, diners eager to post pictures of their meals are a disrupting the fine dining experience at some New York City restaurants.
Steven Hall, PR representative for Bouley restaurant, does not want to ban the practice entirely, but hopes diners will use more common sense. "People have kind of forgotten their manners," Hall said. "Your food is getting cold, your ice cream is melting, all so that they can get the lighting for their picture. It disrupts the flow of service."
Joann Makovitzky, whose Tocqueville restaurant on Union Square features metal walls that turn the restaurant into a cell phone dead-zone, also discourages photos for the sake of other diners. "My philosophy is it's not your own dining room, you're there with many other diners," Makovitzky explained. "People are there for their own dining experience and anything you do to infringe on that experience, we frown on."
Despite the growing number of restaurants seeking to restrict the practice, an official ban on taking photos of your New York restaurant meal is not expected any time soon. "At our level, it's not something we're looking to regulate or weigh in on in any way," Andrew Moesel, head of the New York State Restaurant Association said. "Some restaurants would encourage people to share the dishes that they serve there, while others might want to make sure the dining experience is more private."
Hall agrees. "With the advent of social media, it just became that people like food porn," Hall said. "People really love looking at pictures of food."
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