Just Another App
In 2010, I attended an event in Downtown Las Vegas. Someone kept pestering me to download an app called Burbn. Everyone was going on about how it allowed users to share photos, and I couldn't understand the appeal. It seemed to me like a waste of time and I preferred not to clutter my phone with another app.
Little did I know this app—which would soon rebrand as Instagram—would accelerate the downfall of food quality around the world.
San Sebastián
As a purveyor of high-end ingredients to the Las Vegas Strip, I traveled the world visiting my artisanal producers. One of my favorite destinations was San Sebastián, where I'd visit Ortiz, my tuna and anchovies supplier. They'd been canning seafood for generations, and the quality was impeccable. In 2010, there was so much good food it didn't matter which restaurant you visited. The same stalls selling fresh seafood were happy to cook it for you— quickly fried or served raw. I remember sucking on percebes as I walked the narrow streets, enjoying the beautiful town with my friend Philippe, one of the godfathers of the caviar industry. Philippe would tell me stories about getting mixed up with Basque revolutionaries as a kid and the trouble that followed.
I visited Philippe again a decade later in 2022. The town had completely changed.
The amazing seafood stalls were gone, replaced by gastrobars serving the most beautiful pintxos imaginable. Walk by these bars and you see a smorgasbord of diverse offerings, all tantalizing. Sea urchin served in its shell. Head-on shrimp with perfect grill marks. Anchovies gleaming on bruschetta. This cornucopia of food beckoning you into the bar for a taste.
Philippe and I ordered heavily with empty stomachs. We plowed into our selections.
They were all tasteless.
We had been fooled. The sea urchin was stuffed with breadcrumbs to make it seem fuller. The enzymes from the shrimp head had reduced the shrimp's texture to mush. The bruschetta was an oil-soaked sponge. Everything I remembered from 2010 had been replaced with visually appealing pintxos that only the drunk could choke down.
This was one of the food capitals of the world, and it had suffered the same fate I'd been finding in food capitals around the world.
Everyone in the gastrobars—tourists and locals alike—had their phones out. Snapping pictures, bragging to their followers and friends about the amazing lives they were having eating these beautiful pintxos. But if you were actually there, you knew it was a performance without substance. The photos they were posting were lies told in perfect lighting.
Philippe and I reminisced about selling caviar and shared our conspiracy theories about the origin of Kaluga, while enjoying delicious Basque wines. The quality of the wine and conversation had not diminished.
Tourism to San Sebastián grew from 214,732 visitors in 2010 to 960,282 visitors annually by 2023. The city maintains 18 Michelin stars within a 25km radius, but that culinary excellence became its curse when amplified through social media. Rental prices increased 17% in 2016 alone. The locals got priced out. The tourists got pretty pictures. Everyone pretended this was progress.
I told myself maybe it was just Spain. Then I went back to Tokyo.
Tsukiji
In 2011, I visited Japan to film an advertisement for Google Translate. A film crew followed me throughout the country, with one of my favorite stops at Tsukiji Market. Tsukiji was amazing. So huge you couldn't walk every aisle in a day. Thousands of vendors set up on cobblestone floors. You could watch frozen bluefin tuna being sawed with bandsaws. Buy and eat huge fresh oysters as you walked. Maybe stop at one of the hundreds of four-seat restaurants serving the freshest sushi imaginable.
I remember watching bonito flakes being freshly shaved into large bags like pillowcases, and tasting them while still warm from the friction of the shaving blades. The ikura—salmon roe—was so fresh and delicious I ate it in temaki that looked like ice cream cones. Those were gone when I returned. Gone were the maitake mushrooms that could be eaten fresh and tasted of the mountain cedar forests. Very few tourists then. Just endless amazing food.
In 2023, I returned to Tsukiji Market. As my subway pulled into the station, my mouth was watering with memories from twelve years before.
Something had changed.
The government had moved the seafood market to a private warehouse only accessible to people in the industry. All that remains of Tsukiji is one small block of vendors the government allowed to stay to entertain tourists. You can now walk the entire market in an hour. The only food that remains? Overpriced sushi restaurants serving second-quality seafood.
This tiny remaining market is inundated with tourists snapping photos like it's the Disney Epcot version of a fish market. They all fight for a seat in the sushi restaurants and leave with glum faces, having eaten sushi of the same quality found in any Lawson's convenience store.
I was heartbroken.
The inner market closed October 6, 2018. The official reasons were aging facilities, earthquake resistance, fire safety, sanitation. But the real problem was tourists. Tourists touching tuna worth up to $50,000 each. Pushing baby strollers on the auction floor. Japanese television documented extreme incidents—a British tourist who licked the head of a frozen tuna, a female tourist who stripped naked and was hauled around on a wooden handcart by friends.
Foreign visitors to Japan increased 263% from 2010 to 2018—8.6 million to 31.19 million annually. This explosion coincided precisely with Instagram's growth from launch in 2010 to 1 billion users by June 2018.
Tsukiji has never been more famous or popular than it is now. The food has never been worse. But, at least the photos look great.
I haven't seen this Instagram effect devastate the food in Mexico or Italy. Maybe because the competition is too fierce and the local populations won't tolerate mediocre food the way tourists will. When your abuela is still making tacos or your nonno is judging your carbonara, you can't get away with serving garbage just because it photographs well.
This isn't about nostalgia or complaining that things were better in the old days. This is about economics. Instagram created a new incentive structure where restaurants maximize revenue by optimizing for cameras instead of palates. And once that incentive structure exists, the outcome is inevitable.
A generation of restaurants designed not for eating, but for photography.
Why It Happened
Thirty percent of young diners won't even consider a restaurant if its Instagram is weak. Seventy-three percent choose where to eat based on photos they saw on social media. Restaurants respond rationally to these incentives. They track which dishes get photographed most and adjust menus accordingly.
Chef Simon Horwitz spent months sourcing tables, light fixtures, and custom-crafted clay plates, then designed his Paris restaurant Elmer with 'soft, yellow spotlight shining down on each plate, so diners could not only see their food, but could also photograph it without requiring extra lighting. He admitted that "Instagram immediately became the factor driving business."
The question in the kitchen is no longer "Does this taste good?" It's "Will this get likes?"
Dishes are designed to photograph well in the restaurant's lighting. Colors are brightened. Garnishes are selected for visual pop rather than flavor contribution. A dish that photographs well generates free marketing through customer posts. A dish that tastes exceptional but looks ordinary? Generates nothing.
In the attention economy of Instagram, appearance has become the only currency that matters. Taste is irrelevant.
What We've Lost
Food is no longer for self-enjoyment. Diners get their pleasure not from the food but from sharing photos and making their friends envious.
The tragedy isn't just declining quality. It's that entire food cultures have been corrupted. Places like San Sebastián and Tsukiji weren't just great places to eat—they were authentic expressions of local food culture evolved over generations. Now they're theme parks. Photo ops.
Instagram transformed eating from a personal, sensory experience into a public performance.
We proved this strategy works. Every time we choose a restaurant because of how it looks on someone's feed, every time we let food go cold while we frame the perfect shot, every time we drive past a hole-in-the-wall that serves amazing food because their Instagram game is weak.
The celebrity chefs created the economic model that made corner-cutting inevitable. Instagram created the incentive structure that made those corners irrelevant as long as the plate looked good.
But this only works if we keep playing along.
The chefs who reject this model already exist—you just have to look for them. They run small places. Their Instagram is an afterthought or nonexistent. They source obsessively and charge what quality costs.
These places survive because enough people still value what matters. Not enough to dominate the industry, but enough to prove the model isn't dead.
The shift starts with attention—where you actually spend your money, not just your scrolling time. What you're willing to pay for. Whether you put your phone away and taste what's in front of you.
San Sebastián and Tsukiji didn't fall because Instagram was inevitable. They fell because enough people chose photos over flavor. That choice can be unmade.
The economics will follow the culture because that's what markets do—they respond to actual behavior, not stated preferences. If enough people stop rewarding performance food, restaurants will stop serving it.
Find the hole-in-the-wall with the small menu. Pay a premium for the chef-owned place using ingredients that leave you inspired. Stop following restaurants that optimize for cameras.
Tell people about the places doing it right.