If a meal is eaten and there’s no one around to Instagram it, did you actually eat the meal? Thankfully, you don’t need to answer that question anymore, now that Chili’s is changing its menu to make sure that every morsel of food is worthy of a filter and an upload.
Bloomberg reports that the Tex-Mex food chain is giving its menu a facelift so the food will look better on social media. That means swapping out plastic baskets for stainless-steel containers when plating fries and buns and tweaking the placement of burgers on plates.
https://www.instagram.com/p/1yNBy6tcv2/
“We look a lot more at how the food is presented,” Wyman Roberts, chief executive officer of Chili’s parent company Brinker International Inc. told Bloomberg.
But as Eater notes, focusing more on aesthetics might mean that Chili’s will start making food that looks great, but doesn’t necessarily taste as good. At least there isn’t a super high bar for culinary standards at Chili’s.
Chili’s new policy isn’t just thoughtful to avid food porn Instagrammers. The company is also doing it for shrewd marketing reasons. Nowadays, it’s fairly common for people to use Instagram to find a place to grab a meal, so if a photo of BBQ ribs looks good and it’s tagged at Chili’s, that might be enough to convince someone to hit up their local franchise.
But let’s be honest: No matter what you do, you’re going to look messy eating ribs while taking a selfie, regardless of how pretty the meat looks on a plate.
H/T Eater | Photo via jeepersmedia/Flickr (CC by 2.0)