In the beginning, there was the avocado toast.
Avocado toast begat the sepia-filtered cronut, which begat the “Instagram wall” in all its varieties. Wings painted onto exposed brick or floor-to-ceiling fake flowers, or a cheeky sign only one degree removed from the wooden face cutouts at the boardwalk; anything that could grab the eyes and slow the scrolls around the world. Businesses vying for algorithmic affection on the platforms that have eaten the world must consider not only how they represent themselves, but how others can represent them, too.
Now, with the prevalence of video content on Instagram and TikTok, the spatial demands have been expanded, necessitating that every inch of a restaurant or bar’s interior be calibrated for digital consumption. Forget the food, which was mostly meant for the snap anyway: A venue’s interior must be delectable and endlessly shareable or the proprietor can kiss influencers and their precious influence goodbye. And like a perfectly designed soundstage, it needs to be camera-ready at all times.
Natural lighting is perhaps the most important element of filming food videos, according to Henry Wu, a San Francisco-based food blogger. “If it's completely indoors and there are no windows, that would be rough,” he said.
More often than not, Wu opts to skip capturing food in poor lighting, a missed opportunity for whatever business he wants to cover. Light or die, basically. For this very reason, the palm-filled courtyard outside of Cassava in Jackson Square has received an excess of attention online.
That’s why diners are seeing more big windows for abundant natural light and clean, cute tables that make capturing sugar crystals on a morning bun a snap. Curated, sparsely-filled merchandise shelves, clean subway tiles, and pastel trim are elements of an ideal TikTok setting. At least for now. You could pour tens of thousands of dollars into designing your space for the look of the moment (cabincore! beige-on-beige!) only to see it go cringe in an instant.
One place that seems to have caught the aesthetic of the moment is Butter & Crumble in North Beach, where folks wait outside for up to two hours for their baked goods. (The company is forced to ration due to high demand.) Luckily, hungry trendhoppers eroding the concrete on Francisco St. are greeted by an adorable white-painted brick facade, big windows trimmed in pink, and a neon sign in the shape of a cake. Inside, a perfectly sparse merch shelf provides a neutral backdrop on one wall. Pink subway tiles line the counter and, just behind some glass, bakers are on full display laminating batches of croissants and stacking cake layers.
“It's very aesthetically pleasing,” said Anoosha Chari, a food blogger based in Berkeley. “They have a little section with merch and then on the right hand side you can actually see the bakers rolling out the croissant dough and doing different finishing touches. So you get that feeling of being in a nice, cute little aesthetic cafe where you can take pictures.”
Chari calls it “one of the prime spaces” to shoot in San Francisco. “I think that also is a huge reason why a lot of influencers chose Butter & Crumble, because the desserts look very Instagramable but also the space is very cute and nicely set up, too.” Chari said she ate there once.
No card on the moodboard for Butter & Crumble’s interior explicitly shouts “optimized for content creation,” but they nonetheless hit on some shareable details. “There were a couple things here and there, like doing the mosaic on the floor that says ‘fresh-baked,’” said Kelsey Guarino, the San Francisco-based interior designer behind Butter & Crumble’s space. “That was a spot where we were like, okay, somebody might want to open up their pastry box and hold it by the mosaic and take a picture. That could be an instagramable moment.” (It is.)
Guarino was very focused on balancing trendier design elements with timeless ones, with the hopes that Butter & Crumble’s space could weather hype cycles. “You're not just creating a space, you're creating an experience,” she said. “That's the thing with design: If you do it well, it inherently becomes very photographable, very beautiful, something that shows well in videos and photographs and that people want to take pictures of.”
In a way, the bakery’s virality exceeds itself: A simple reverse-image search of Butter & Crumble’s interiors pulled directly from their Instagram yielded a range of confusing results. Could it be Yummy Tummy’s in Brooklyn? Flirt Cupcakes in Alberta, Canada? Miggy’s Bakes in Middleton, Wisconsin? Bibble Bake in Bali? Our Father Cafe in New South Wales? The mass coalescence of taste has made it so that Butter & Crumble could exist anywhere in the world, and therefore, can grab the attention of anyone in the world.
These recurring design choices like millennial pink, subway tiles, and atelier letter menu boards fall under what author Thomas Friedman would call “flatteners,” globally-adopted and digitally-pervasive features that blur the uniqueness of a specific location. The sameness of aesthetics worldwide has scrubbed storefronts of their geography: If you’re in one, you can be anywhere. The author Kyle Chayka calls this place of no place Filterwold.
“A lot of people assume the relationship between algorithms and people is monodirectional, with algorithms only influencing us. But really, the relationship is bidirectional, with people also affecting the algorithm,” according to Ross Dahlke, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s school of journalism and communications. Dahlke's research focuses on how media and algorithmic trends flow through daily life.
The more a storefront meets aesthetic preferences expedited by the algorithm, the more people post photos of that space, because they want their content to perform well, just like a bakery wants to sell out of croissants. Those photos further fuel the algorithm, sending more photographers to the storefront hoping to capture the same vibe, thus perpetuating the cycle of lifestyle homogenization.
This feedback loop isn’t necessarily all negative. Guarino, the Butter & Crumble designer, notes that as more people seek community and connection, curated spaces can serve to attract likeminded folks to a friendly environment. And, besides, what’s the point in poo-poo’ing a pretty, well-lit space?
“That warm energy is such an important part of a bakery space,” Guarino said. “It has this community-driven aspect that I think a lot of people are craving.”
