Restaurants are the new theatre
IF you can’t share the moment, did it really happen? So: Make it Instagrammable – that appears to be the philosophy of the trendiest new restaurants popping up on social media and making our dinners out ever more cinematic.
The wonder of our present day is the contradictory trends. At the moment, castrophic fears abound concerning war, inflation, covid, the climate crisis and general decline. But then there’s this: A return of the Roaring Twenties, a time when people are dining in style again.
You are WHAT you eat. But also WHERE you eat. Escapism is the latest trend - an escape from everyday life to a world like in some Hollywood film. A question about the spirit of the times is this: Will going out be increasingly staged for display on social networks?
“The dining experience” is being taken to some new heights - or lows, depending on your point of view. Top gastronomy publisher Marcella Prior-callwey has helped us understand what the new event-dining megatrends are all about.
“Everything in this bar is conceived with the idea of an experience,” say critics of the Bellboy Bar, a Tel Aviv cocktail bar that has since spread to Berlin.
For example, drinks are served in mini-bathtubs with little toy ducks floating in them. In this bar-restaurant with its “mystically plush” decor, the minimum age is 25.
Meanwhile on West Berlin’s elegant Kurfuerstendamm boulevard, restaurant MQ offers Californiastyle dining, while Berlin’s Italian restaurant Coccodrillo has a wild mixture of 1970s, Hollywood, diner and Italian-disco styles, local critics say.
It is the second trattoria in Germany by the gastronomy outfit Big Squadra, the German branch of the Big Mamma Group. Prior to Berlin, the group had created a big stir in places like Paris, London, Madrid, Marseilles and Monaco. Big Mamma’s design studio, Kiki, loves to design guest rooms of splashy-coloured retro-kitch.
“It isn’t our goal to be seen as an Instagram restaurant,” Big Squadra communications officer Chiara Baumgartner said. “But if it is beautiful and exceptional, then pictures will be taken and people will want to share them. That’s how it is.”
Naturally, photogenic bars and restaurants have been around for a long time – whether due to their breathtaking views, their location up in the mountains or on a waterfront, or because of their impressive space. But during the course of the 2010s it became apparent that even if located in boring spots, cafes and bars increasingly feature hip interior designs. The gastronomical world has mutated into one Global Village.
And, regardless of whether it is Manhattan Island or Barcelona, the new trendy places share many interior decor features in common: lightbulbs with visibly glowing filaments, vintage furniture, walls of brick or of concrete, chalkboards, hanging flower baskets, clipboard menus or even the bicycle on the
wall, for whatever reason.
“The gastronomical world is now much farther along than just wanting to be ‘Instagramamble,’” says Marcella Prior-callwey of the publishing company Callweyverlag in Munich. “It’s about the live experience, for only in that way can analogue offerings compete against the digital world.” Her publishing house each year stages a competition seeking “the most beautiful restaurants and bars” in Germany.
“Restaurants are the new theatre. They are conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art),” Prior-callwey says. The entrepreneurs aim to speak to all the senses with eclectic designs, music tailored to the setting, and attractive menus.
Patrons want to have the best possible time there instead of just watching others online, she says. “They say to themselves: If I am spending money and investing the time, then I want it to be something stunning.”
Prior-callwey says that the trailblazers of the so-called megatrend now spreading across Europe and beyond have been, among others, from London. There, such exclusive brasseries as Sexy Fish,
Amazonico, Sketch, and The Maine Mayfair have paved the way.
In such places there is often some unusual combination on the plate and new ideas about how meals should be presented, whether for one person or for more, so-called sharing, says Priorcallwey. “Many guests want to see and be seen in such big-city restaurants. But above all it’s about the real moment that they want to experience.”
The noble event dining experience
is just one part of peoples’ overloaded present-day lives, in which everyone - from classical cultural institutions to media to streaming services - competes for customers’ wallets and, above all, their time and attention, she notes.
“We are all inundated with offers that are clamouring for attention,” says Prior-callwey. “And you have to offer something and fill the time as stunningly as possible - and that’s exactly what these restaurants are doing.” – dpa