‘Please eat it, stop filming it’: Top foodie spots have mixed feelings about social media success

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It’s around 35 minutes into queueing for ice cream on a quiet street in the 11th arrondissement of Paris that we begin to question our life choices.

In front of us, a TikToker films content. Behind, an Australian couple in their sixties gently ask their extremely trendy daughter and her extremely trendy boyfriend if there might be another ice cream place nearby?

Instafans are flocking to Folderol in Paris.

They are sent to sit on the curb; the daughter and the boyfriend stick it out, their eyes glittering at the promise of securing a scoop or two from Folderol – a purveyor of glaces artisanales which has become social media’s sensation du jour.

Folderol is not alone. In wealthy cities the world over, gastronomic “event queues” are on the rise, snaking outside cafés caught in the glare of internet obsession.

TikTok is bringing hordes of people to bakeries like brand-new It’s Bagels in London’s upscale Primrose Hill, where on Saturday mornings you can wait in line for a staggering two-and-a-half hours for a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel.

You could make your own bagels in that time. But then you’d miss out on the queue. And the queue is half the point.

On TikTok, #queue has more than 200 million views. Standing in line for a new opening, a product launch or (more often than not) a much-hyped sandwich is bread and butter for content creators.

Search It’s Bagels and you’ll find endless videos of people filming themselves approaching the queue, in the queue, getting to the end of the queue, and finally picking up their order and tucking in.

The cafe that notionally started it all was The Breakfast Club, founded in Soho in 2005, where a queue was ubiquitous in the mini-chain’s early years, and it was a novelty to line up (although much sneered-at by the food cognoscenti).

Now it has branches from London and Oxford to Chelmsford and Gatwick, and it’s easier to stroll in for a stack of pancakes or “greasy spoon” special.

Customers can wait for more than two hours for a bagel on Saturday morning at It’s Bagels in London

In trendy Hackney, Pophams Bakery regularly crops up on lists of “most Instagrammable spots in London”.

Owner Ollie Gold has a complicated relationship with the queue that snakes out of the door at weekends as people wait for one of his now legendary pastries (famed for their exquisite lamination, which delivers the double whammy of tasting wonderful while also photographing beautifully). “The queue was never something that we thought about or thought that would ever happen,” says Gold. It just happened.

Social media hype is “a double-edged sword”, he says. When people post about the queue, it naturally adds to that feeling of “you need to be in this queue”, which can only be good for business.

But Gold doesn’t actually want people to wait for their pastries. “The ideal thing is people walk in and they’ve ordered and are out within two minutes. […] Seeing the queues, it obviously puts some people off. On the other hand, it shows that a place is busy. Why are places usually busy? Because they have a good product.”

The people queuing, then, are the sort who are as taken in by hype as they are the prospect of eating a really good croissant. “Some people love hype and would be up for that queue,” says Gold, who adds that creating a buzz on social media was “absolutely not something we focused on” when opening. “We didn’t have a queue for years. It’s years of building up a reputation.”

He is grateful for the attention, though it does irk him slightly when he sees a pastry going cold while someone films it. “We’re all standing there going, ‘Please eat it, stop filming it, stop taking photos of it.’”

The risk with a viral moment is that it’s inherently fleeting. Hype is a strange thing; more often than not, it’s preceded by the word “over” – no sooner is something hyped than it becomes overhyped and finished.

Gemma Bell, a hospitality expert with a leading PR company in her name, encourages her clients not to manufacture hype. It’s becoming “really common”, she says, for people to want to actively try to create a viral moment – food businesses that “want the whole TikTok hype, that want that immediate millennial, Gen Z [audience] coming to whatever it is they’re doing”.

Diners queue outside indian restaurant Dishoom at Granary Square in the King’s Cross district of London.Credit: Bloomberg

Early hype isn’t necessarily a good thing, she says. “You need to think about what group of people you’re trying to reach.” Otherwise, “you’ll get a lot of people coming along just wanting to take a photo and not really understanding what you’re about. You need to ask: ‘Is that our long-term client? Is that a long-time customer that we want?’ And it might not be.”

Some food brands (typically, she says, bigger high-street businesses) will hire a company to help them generate a “viral moment”. Bell’s concern is always “What happens next?” “It’s a sudden surge,” she says. Your average independent bakery really just wants to become a regular haunt, she says, not a one-hit wonder.

The pasta restaurant Padella, in London’s Borough Market, was among the first to do the event queue. Tim Siadatan opened Padella in 2016 when TikTok was still a twinkle in the Instagram influencer’s eye.

They ran a queue rather than a booking system purely because they were small and wanted a high turnover of covers. “It quickly became a double-edged sword,” he says.

“It used to go all the way down the street … and that caused a lot of hype. We would have people take photos from up in the Shard looking down on people in the queue, which was amazing publicity. The other side of that was – how do we manage this? Because no one wants to stand in a queue.”

Siadatan would send out nibbles to keep people happy. Then came the complaints. “Transport for London had an issue with it because of where it is in terms of the entrance to the Tube. The local council had an issue because of health and safety. Borough Market had an issue with it – they’re our landlords. It was blocking other people’s restaurants.”

The restaurant had to employ people to manage the queue. These days, it operates a virtual queue, as more and more restaurants do (even The Breakfast Club). You put your name down on an app and busy yourself with a pint in a nearby pub while you wait.

Shamil Thakrar, co-founder of Dishoom, another early adopter of the queue, says it was never part of the plan. In fact, Thakrar is a little “embarrassed” by it. “I see our job as hospitality. […] In that sense, the queue is possibly a barrier to hospitality.”

They have found a way around it by making the queue part of the hospitality experience, handing out cups of chai or sherry. If he was opening a new place, would he actively try to cultivate a so-called event queue? “No. 100 per cent not.”

I visited Folderol, that ice cream and natural wine bar in Paris, in early May, when the hype was beginning to build and this quiet street in the 11th arrondissement was filling up with influencers cradling little bowls of ice cream and glasses of cloudy wine.

After a challenging summer fending off the hordes and their iPhones, the owners, who really just wanted to serve great ice cream (and it is, it should be said, delicious), banned people from sitting on the street.

“They don’t even taste the ice cream. They just let it pool into a bowl of melting liquid and die in the sun,” she confessed to the New York Times.

Signs read: “No TikTok.” “Be here to have fun, not to take pictures.”

How long, I wonder, will it take for the signs to appear outside It’s Bagels? “Come for the lox, not for the likes.”

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