Let us look at the media atmospheres around a restaurant from the Thessaloniki scene that is indicative of all the above, THRiA a self-described restaurant of “Gourmet flavors inspired by the Mediterranean and Greece cuisine” (italics added).24 The word “inspired” in the self-description implies a move away from the grandmother’s “close-minded” authenticity to claim a post-authenticity that relies on the creative interpretations of a new popular agent—the chef. For the context of a less touristy developed European town like Thessaloniki, with no significant links to financial capital and thus to really elite dining, THRiA is a representative upscale restaurant25 and a typical site of the gastronomical imaginary in a peripheral scene with a strong food identity. We can notice the ideals of purity, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and thinness that THRiA inhabits in this scene in an expert review about the Thessaloniki food scene published in LiFO, a popular Greek lifestyle free press, and shared on THRiA’s Facebook account:26
THRiA from the beginning had something diferent to say. Something more gastronomical, more creative, more gourmet […] If, say, Michelin came to town for awards, they would definitely stop by here to try a crispy puf pastry with black sesame, mint feta, and nettle foam. The decor, the open kitchen work like a television—behind the glass you get carried away watching a hyper-spectacle of young, stylish persons working via a balletic coordination the choreography of the latest kitchen techniques, civilized and clean cut, without screaming, without beating themselves up, a feeling that makes you think that “New York and the Thessaloniki Waterfront are the same”. European and cinematic.
(Psihouli, 2018)
Here the local/authentic undergoes an uplifting by signifiers like “New York”, “Europe”, “Michelin”, and “cinematic” pointing to a creative high-end cosmopolitanism; the expert ingredient language of crispy puf pastry with black sesame, mint feta, and nettle foam points toward deep gastronomical knowledge and sophistication. The cooks appear as young-and-stylishballerinas and therefore their slim and trained bodies invoke “thinness”, which is another central ideal in Finn’s classification. As Mylonas puts it, “the restaurant appears as an experiencescape in which the cooks—besides preparing delicious, creative, and chic dishes—also perform elegant and sanitized choreographic spectacles of craftsmanship and civility” (2020: 104). The expert review designates the restaurant as a civilized spectacle, a forwardlooking enterprise which aesthetically moves the city forward toward Western civilization, a sort of “total work of art”, to use Matthew Wilson Smith’s understanding of Wagner’s famous Gesamtkunstwerk in the age of cyberspace (2007).
Key to spreading this artfulness in the age of platforms are posts in the social media accounts of restaurants and chefs, especially involving photographs and descriptions of dishes. I argue that this coupling between photographic representations and the descriptions of dishes in social media is essential for establishing the idea that the dish is ultimately an artwork, that is not only conventionally tasty, but a rarity crafted by the chef’s inspiration that is almost too opaque to be understood by the masses. The visual representations come typically from a vertical position recalling the two-dimensionality of the canvas while the descriptions perform the curatorial role of skillfully interpreting otherwise obscure works of art (see Figure 5.1).
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Cultures of Platform Capitalism