Over at Skunkpost.com (great name!), there’s an Associated Press story entitled, “Food Bloggers Give Restaurants Indigestion.” Bloggers, at least according to the story, are going into restaurants and taking pictures of their meals, thereby sometimes actually eating the meals only after they’ve grown cold, or distracting other patrons. Many restaurants, including upscale ones, have come to welcome the attention blog posts receive:
Chuck Arendt of San Francisco, who writes about food at chuckeats.com and is co-founder of MainPursuit, a travel app publisher, says he understands “no flash” rules, and agrees that people who take photos to an extreme — 20 shots of one dish — can be annoying.
He aims for two to four pictures, taken quickly. But he hesitates before going to a restaurant with a camera ban….
“People should be allowed to take photos; restaurants should not only see it as a compliment, but also a potential word-of-mouth recommendation to 20-30 people on average, and I think it’s in restaurants’ best interests to accommodate them just a bit more, better lighting for example,” Arendt said.
New York City chef Marc Murphy, owner of the restaurants Landmarc and Ditch Plains, welcomes bloggers. He recently ran a “Surfer Sunday” special at the Ditch Plains restaurant and within a day and a half a review and pictures were up on the Web.
“It just gets the word out quicker,” he says. Murphy sees blogs as introducing an egalitarian note to restaurant criticism. “The world’s changing, everybody’s got an opinion,” he said.
Chef David Chang doesn’t allow cameras at his wildly popular Momofuku Ko restaurant in New York. But he says that’s only because the intimate, 12-seater restaurant simply isn’t big enough. “It was intrusive on other guests.”
At his other restaurants, including Ma Peche, there’s more space and he doesn’t object to cameras.
I’ve yet to see this happen here in Wisconsin, but perhaps in big cities, this happens every so often. I can see how it might be disruptive in a proper restaurant. It’s not something that I would ever consider while at table. For me, a meal is for those enjoying it together, there and then.
Having said that, I did something related recently while in a trendy market in Wisconsin. While shopping for produce, I saw some interesting peppers, that I enjoy, and decided to snap a picture of them with my phone’s camera. (I don’t think this is like photographing one’s own meal, by the way; there’s a lot of bustle in a market, and a meal is a far different experience from simple shopping.)
It took only a moment for an employee of the market to notice me, though, and a supervisor quickly came by to ask, very politely, how she might be of help to me. I was prepared for that possibility, and if she had asked me to stop, I would have done so. Instead, she was more interested, I think, in why I wanted to photograph some peppers.
The market has a notably talkative supervisor of their cheeses, almost a cheese master in his enthusiasm, and I decided to adopt his approach and delivery. The supervisor who confronted me — however subtly — was soon put at ease, deciding that I was neither some sort of inspector nor irritated patron. She talked to me for a bit, about different selections in her produce section, and made a few recommendations.
I was able to keep my photos without incident.
Here, by the way, is one of the photos that I took, of delicious peppers from South Africa:
