When restaurant meals become performances for diners’ followers

Restaurant owners talk about how hard it is to survive, but they keep one gripe pretty much to themselves because the public might take offense: They'd like us to act more like our parents and less like the tourist who backed into and damaged a painting while taking a selfie at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Italy.

- Karen Stabiner, Tribune News Service

To put it in gentler terms, they want us to be more mindful and less performative — to regard dinner at a restaurant as dinner at a restaurant, not as a backdrop for our “notice me” lives. You know: to live in the moment.

Influencers toting selfie lights started it, letting their food get cold while they set up their shots, but this is bigger. We cater to our shrinking attention spans even as we bemoan them, and restaurants bear the brunt. We forget how to sit still; a beautiful plate of food and the chance to catch up with friends is no longer the sufficient thrill it used to be.

A party of eight settled in next to my table of two recently, and managed to order, take lots of photos, graze distractedly through some small plates, call friends and leave before we finished our meal. What they did not do, because they were loud enough to overhear, was have a conversation of any length, or stop long enough to register how good the food was.