Overview
Low restaurant lighting, basic plating and ineffective Nashville filters ruining your damn life? This social media-savvy restaurant knows your struggle. Israel establishment Carmel Winery have been working tirelessly against low-lit, poorly-composed foodstagrams, teaming up with Tel Aviv restaurant Catit to create special Instagrammable meals on tailor-made crockery.
Available only on certain nights, the art project/gastronomy experience/publicity stunt is called 'Foodography' and is probably the most serious control we've ever seen a restaurant take over their social media presence. Created by ceramic design artist Adi Nissani, the Foodography dishes have been crafted to make your food look as good as it possibly could on Instagram.
There are two types:
This one comes with a little shelf to pop your smartphone into, to minimise pesky hand-created blur and give you that studio backdrop your poor dinner's been missing.
Then things get truly crazy...
It's like a Lazy Suzan, or the rotating pedestal they had Sofia Vergara perched on at the 2014 Oscars. 'The 360' allows you spin your food around to either get the perfect angle for your snap or take a weirdly hypnotic Vine of your dinner slowly rotating and let's be honest, probably getting truly cold.
Look at it go! To be fair, that's some near-perfectly distributed sauce.
It's not a cheap escapade of online whimsy; one Foodography session runs at $155 an hour. Yup. Granted, it's five epic-sounding courses (just the first course is bonito fish cured in red wine with grilled organic beetroots and carrots in salt and pomace crust dough, malt crumble, rhubarb jelly, red tune prosciutto, Uzbek apricots) and cheaper than a Blumenthal sitting — and obviously you'll take significantly superior Instagram photos — something that's only sort of acceptable and important with this level of food presentation.
It gets better though. Because a bespoke studio setting doesn't make a primo foodstagrammer out of a novice. There are workshops (yep, workshops) on offer with leading Israeli food photographer Dan Perez to maximise your snapping wizardry. Although the concept isn't available in Australia as yet, Carmel Winery told BuzzFeed they were looking to expand internationally. Suck it, Nashville. You never truly work anyway.
Via BuzzFeed.
Images: Carmel Winery/YouTube.