This Is Why so Many Bars, Restaurants and Coffee Shops Look the Same Across the World

Or how social media has “flattened” personal taste

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Charlie

Photo by Dinuka Lankaloka on Unsplash

You couldn’t snap a decent photo in my wine store and bar.

There was not a single “Instagrammable” spot in there. Every photo came out looking like something your mum would take on her digital camera circa 2005.

I would love to say this was intentional. A way to stop people from whipping out their phone to take photos (“look at us, drinking nice wine in a nice bar #imagecrafting”).

In reality, it was down to my lack of interior design skills and an over-zealous use of the Edison light bulb.

This sort of unintentional, un-aesthetically pleasing design probably wouldn’t fly today. Today, restaurants, bars and cafés seem to be more interested in becoming what restaurant critic Grace Dent wonderfully called Instagram content fulfilment hubs than places with soul or substance.

That’s not just me saying this, there are whole books, podcasts and essays on the issue.

And there is an unfortunate side effect to the hospitality’s obsession with social media-friendly spaces.

Everything looks the same.

The Scandi-chic third-wave coffee shop. The overhead foliage and neon signs in popular brunch spots. The muted, neutral tones of a high-end restaurant. The perfectly imperfect stoneware plates you find in every small plate restaurant the world over.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that social media-focused spaces have flattened our taste and homogenised the look of any joint desperate to chase the influence of the influencer.

And with that change, we’ve lost something special.

Personality. Quirk.

Even more concerning is when places prioritise making their joint social media-friendly at the detriment of the most important aspect of successful hospitality.

Quality.

When algorithms become tastemakers, taste gets boring

Just under a third of Gen Z Brits will only visit restaurants they deem Instagrammable.

Because of that — and us older folk who are just as guilty of photographing for the ‘Gram — social media heavy hitters like Instagram have become tastemakers.

In other words, trends, fashions and tastes are dictated by algorithms.

This isn’t just my theory. New Yorker author Kyle Chayka has written extensively on the subject. His claim?

Algorithmic systems influence the kinds of culture we consume as individuals, molding our personal tastes. Stretching beyond the virtual, they reach into physical space, too, influencing what kinds of places and spaces we gravitate toward, whether we’re trying to decide which store to patronize or where to vacation.

Chayka says you may think your tastes are personal but there’s enough evidence to suggest they are likely dictated by what social media deems trendy at that point in time.

It’s why all third-wave coffee shops look the same, including the one I’m sitting in right now. Big windows, large sharing tables, pretty ceramics and huge plants.

It’s why I chose to furnish my wine store and bar with an inappropriate number of Edison lightbulbs, even if it had the opposite desired effect.

I wasn’t aware how much social media had influenced my interior design decisions but I sure as hell knew I wanted to pull the plaster off the wall and expose the brick.

It was 2013, after all.

So here we are, a species whose cultural and aesthetic world is influenced by an incredibly powerful tastemaker which homogenises everything until it all starts to look the same.

Disconcertingly so.

But what happens when hospitality joints are more interested in creating a social media-friendly space at the expense of everything else?

What happens when content > quality?

Content > quality

Bars, restaurants and coffee shops don’t run on infinite funds. If an owner or investor wants to follow the social media trend du jour, that can cost a lot of money.

Those large neon signs don’t come cheap.

And what happens when the trend changes and the place decides to move with the times? Renovations can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If a joint focuses on style over substance, that means less money for the important stuff.

Quality ingredients. Decent drinks. And arguably the most important thing of all.

The wages of experienced staff.

After running my own place for nearly a decade, I can tell you that without good staff, you’re destined to fail. Quality staff don’t come cheap but how will you afford them if you’ve spent all your money on a living plant ceiling?

It matters. Just look at this scathing review of an outrageously expensive social media-friendly London restaurant:

It was staffed plentifully with the sort of people who let you wander about for ages looking for your table, the bathroom or the lifts without quite realising it’s their job to steer you. Oh, how I miss the days when places were staffed by folk who had worked in a restaurant before.

What also matters — and I’m sure you will have noticed across the world — is the homogenisation of menus.

If I see rubbery eggs benedict and tasteless avocado toast on a menu one more time, I’m going to throw my poorly-made flat white at the chef.

Yet menus like this are everywhere, from Porto to Chiang Mai. Eggs Benny rubbing shoulders with congee should never be a thing.

We are at a weird point of humanity where content has become more important than nourishment, individuality or even enjoyment. And that content has an unparalleled sameness about it thanks to our obsession with feeding a tastemaking algorithm.

It’s exhausting.

But here’s the kicker. As someone who didn’t care all that much for the ‘grammable nature of their bar, I can tell you from experience that no one wins in a flattened taste world.

And some places are starting to understand that.

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Quality > content

I don’t mean to toot my own horn too much, but my wine store and bar was successful.

I spent untold hours worrying it wouldn’t be. That people would be put off by those unflattering lightbulbs or the fact that you had to pass through the kitchen to go to the bathroom. That you couldn’t take a good picture for social media wherever you went in the place.

That we were what

Blackbird Spyplane

calls an Ungrammable Hang Zone.

But that didn’t put our customers off.

I spent a lot of time wondering why. After eight years I realised it came down to two things.

First, it was because customers enjoyed the quirkiness and personality they felt lacking in some of the more Instagrammable joints in the town.

Second, it was because we offered quality.

Call me old fashioned but I’m convinced that quality trumps pretty much everything else in hospitality. And in my experience, people are incredibly astute at telling the difference between the substandard and the excellent.

Even if more cynical establishments think they can’t.

If more establishments cared about quality over content fulfilment, there would be less flattening of taste. Less sameness. More quirk and personality.

There are plenty of places that do exactly this — Ungrammable Hang Zones exist everywhere.

I mean, you try taking a photo in some of the old-school bars in places like Spain or Portugal with their strip lighting and beige food.

Places that are still brimming with people.

Quality > content creation? It can happen. In fact, it must.

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Sameness is exhausting. We crave differences in our human experiences. We don’t want every restaurant to be a Noma knockoff, or every cocktail bar to look like New York’s Death & Co.

Yet here we are.

I fear that the flattening of taste will be a trend that’s here to stay a while longer. But that doesn’t mean you have to succumb to it.

You can find the places that make you feel comfortable and happy, even if it’s impossible to take a decent photo there. You can seek out quality over fake fancy.

Lord only knows we could all do with a bit more quality and a bit less content in our lives.

Ungrammable Hang Zones are a good place to start.

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