THRiA, as thousands if not million other restaurants around the world, share in their social media accounts visual representations portraying dishes as inspiring artworks. There is an emphasis on the geometry of the space and the plate’s design, the shape of the ingredients, the color tones and the expressiveness of the chef that is represented in the “impulsive” strokes of sauces and dips on top of the dish, as if in an abstract expressionist painting. The mobile phone ofers a dispersed accessibility for photographing dishes and social media platforms make the distribution of these images simple, not only for the restaurants themselves but also for restaurant goers. The “Instagrammable dish”, if we are to call it that, is a recognizable style to the point that AI apps and services are built to mimic it.27
The descriptions are equally artified, drawing on curatorial language that brings wider social and cultural associations to food (though they can also be possibly produced in artificial intelligence (AI) via ChatGPT and other language processing platforms). Let us look at THRiA’s descriptions on its Facebook page:
The Babushka–Nonna Experience
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