Love Bite: Viral Instagram Food and Grandiose Birthday Cakes

Words: Lauren O’Neill

I was recently asked one of the best questions a person can possibly hear: “What sort of birthday cake would you like?”

I’m going to be 30 soon, so in her infinite sweetness my mom wanted to get me a cake to mark the occasion. I mention my age because like anyone with a checkered rug in her flat and an overactive Instagram account (what I’m saying is that I’m a millennial), I knew my answer immediately. 

There’s a style of cake that seems like it is perennially popular with women who share my tastes. I like crap with bows on it, basically.  I’m also partial to some very millennial design trends, like big scrunchies and those little plastic storage crates. You’ll have seen the cakes I’m talking about on social media, where they are unavoidable. Usually they are brightly coloured and covered with ripples and columns and swirls of overly ornate piping, sometimes topped with glacé cherries, or covered in edible glitter. Aesthetically, they’re a stylised, tongue-in-cheek update on an over-the-top almost tacky 70s-style gateau, and in that way they’re pretty much the quintessential Instagram Food. 

An Instagram Food is an interesting concept. I spend a lot of my time on the internet - and let’s be honest, a lot of my time in general - looking at and thinking about food, and it means that I see dishes over and over that feel designed to appeal on social media, where photos of them will be shared, and then, hopefully for the restaurant or chef serving it up create demand. 
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Millennials are probably the first generation that can genuinely be described as digital natives, so it makes sense that our tastes have been influenced by seeing the world like this – that is, through the lens of what looks good in the context of an Instagram grid post. Millennial interiors trends, for example, are also defined by definite, graphic elements – chunky lines, waves and checks. It’s easy to see how this dominant aesthetic has emerged from social media: it’s bold, and importantly, each individual item is eye-catching enough to potentially stop you in your tracks and get you to buy it.

By the same principle, then, it’s easy to understand how Instagram Foods came to be. Sometimes Instagram Foods mimic the design trends you see elsewhere, like tarts iced with the sort of Insta-famous wiggles you might see in the hyper-millennial homes I mention. Sometimes they look cartoonish and almost hyper-real (I recently was convinced to buy a fried chicken sandwich from the excellent Lucky’s Hot Chicken because the Texas Toast it’s served on, thick sliced and perfectly square, basically looked like it was from Scooby Doo). Otherwise they tend to just be straight up indulgent, like anything associated with the phrase “cheese pull”, or stupid, like the giant croissant you can get in Kensington in west London. Whatever their selling point, however, a successful Instagram Food should be novel, and it should make you want to pause your endless scroll and find out about it. 

“Ultimately, you can’t eat or experience an Instagram photo, and it’s useful to remember that the most viral thing isn’t necessarily the best.”

When an Instagram Food takes off, it can genuinely turn a restaurant’s fortunes around. For example, when Onda Pasta Bar in Manchester posted a video of their “tiramisu drawer” in September 2023, the business owners, by their own admission, have stated that they weren’t far away from going bankrupt. Someone commented on the clip saying that they wished it was their bedside table, and 40 million views later, Onda is booked and busy. 

Stories like this are really heartening in the world of the famously difficult and unforgiving hospitality industry, where hours are long, the work is tough, and profit margins, most of the time, are slim. These days, it’s smart for restaurants to do social media well, and the success of an Instagram Food is a little bit of a double edged sword: I once worked in a bakery with a Viral Menu Item and if it wasn’t available, customers were sometimes demanding or rude to us, and I’ve heard the same from other people who’ve done Front of House at other places that are big on Insta, too. Still, it certainly gets bums on seats. 

The only real issue is that sometimes, Instagram Foods can result in more importance placed on style than substance, which means, as I’ve written before, they can also come at the detriment of quality, as virality, rather than deliciousness, is the primary selling point. Their dominance can also mean that those restaurants which haven’t quite got to grips with social media, or who don’t have their own know-how, or the cash for a comms officer, can be pushed into the background undeservedly. Ultimately, you can’t eat or experience an Instagram photo, and it’s useful to remember that the most viral thing isn’t necessarily the best.  

That said, it’s a lovely feeling to see a plate of food coming towards you that looks the part as well as tasting great: it’s a big element of what we go to restaurants for, after all. And while I’m aware of the limitations of Instagram Food, it certainly hasn’t stopped me from requesting my silly Insta-style birthday cake. Food, after all, is best when it’s fun – and what could be more purely fun than a slice of cake iced in a style that would put the Palace of Versailles to shame? The answer, my friends, is nothing at all.