No food shots at top chef ’s venue or you’ll Roux the day

MICHEL Roux leaves me with mixed feelings – and not just because I’ve wasted my life getting lumps out of a Béchamel sauce while mistakenly blaming Michel for inventing the roux. Roux (the chef, not the flourbutter combo that robs you of your youth) has banned people photographing their meals at his restaurant, the Waterside Inn in southeast England. Photos, he claims, don’t do justice to the food. See, on the one hand, Roux, pictured, runs a three-Michelin-star restaurant and can be as temperamental as he likes. On the other hand, it costs a bomb to eat there – about £300 per couple, excluding drinks, for the à la carte menu – which might lead patrons to believe they’ve paid for the privilege of uploading a snap of the ‘pommes de terre du jour’ to Instagram. But the other hand – the third, deciding hand – concludes that anything that reduces the number of photos of other people’s dinners on social media has to be good. In fact, anything that reduces the number of photos of other people’s anything on social media would be good. I include your children (unless you happen to have conjoined octuplets or something); your pets (unless they’re in hilarious fancy dress costume or are miniature alpacas or ideally both); and your food (unless there’s a slug in the salade de saison). And as pets and children under nine aren’t allowed at The Waterside anyway, and slugs are barred from the salads, patrons will have to observe a social media blackout. I’m with Roux.