It’s important that your hipster cafe serves Instagrammable food. If your hipster cafe doesn’t serve Instagrammable food, it risks vanishing despite technically existing. The shallow life of hipsters revolves around social media (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc), only validating and giving existence to things that are constantly present in the form of comments, photos and videos.
When a hipster with many fake friends (aka followers) validates a thing, person or place on social media, it may cause a ripple effect, compelling other hipsters (and their followers) to validate that very same thing, person or place. When this occurs in a significant mass of people, in a brief amount of time, we call this ‘going viral’.
So how do you entice hipsters to your hipster cafe, take photos or videos of your food, apply filters, emojis and virtual stickers, with captions like “best thing i ever put in my mouth”?
We don’t have a guaranteed formula but we can check off a list of characteristics that some of the most famous Instagrammable foods have:
- Fusion Food
- Colours That Pop!
- Weird Plates & Plating
- DECADENCE
- New But Familiar
Fusion Food
One of the key components of Instagrammable food is fusion, combining visual and flavour elements of distinct foods, sometimes from separate cultural cuisines. Examples include the cronut (croissant + doughnut) and bao buns with non-Chinese fillings (Chinese mantou / steamed bun + Japanese karaage or Mexican birria).
At our hipster cafe Bang Bang in 2021, we created the ‘Curry Boat’ to honour Bon Om Touk (Cambodian Water Festival). Bon Om Touk is celebrated in Cambodia with feasts and dragon boat races for 3 days from late October to early November, marking the end of the monsoon season.
Our curry boat harmonised two unrelated traditional foods with a rich history in their respective countries: the Cambodian curry and the German pretzel bread. To successfully create an Instagrammable food by combining cultural recipes, the end product must not only look and sound appetising but also be easily understood in concept by your hipster customers.
Proceed with caution if you have poor or no credentials. You may risk accusations of exploiting or appropriating culture if you sell fusion foods without thorough research and respect to its history. Using our curry boat as an example, we could execute it without public scorn because our team is Cambodian, one of our co-owners was a German (pastry) chef, and we worked closely with a German food caterer. Now imagine if we made the curry boat as extra ambitious, white French men. That’d be like micro scale colonialism.
Colours That Pop!
Buddha bowls, beetroot hummus, and rainbow bagels. What these Instagrammable foods have in common are colours that become eye sores if you stare at them for too long.
Bright, pop-py colours on Instagrammable foods serve a single purpose to hipsters who post on social media. When people are scrolling idly on their phones, the bright, pop-py colours may snap them out of their zombie mind state. Within a few split seconds, it grabs their attention and increases the chance of engagement with the poster (the hipster who posted the photo or video). Hipsters crave engagement and validation, so Instagrammable foods with pop-py colours are valuable tools for them to meet that end.
Some of the most eye-catching, pop-py colours in Instagrammable foods (and corresponding ingredients in Cambodia) are:
- violet (red cabbage, butterfly pea flower, blueberry, purple potato or yam)
- hot pink (radish, beetroot, dragon fruit)
- crimson red (ripe tomato, bell pepper, chilli pepper, pomegranate, hibiscus tea)
- yellow-orange and marigold orange (mango, papaya, turmeric)
- lime and shamrock green (fresh herbs, citrus fruits, avocado, matcha tea)
It’s worth noting that the listed ingredients are ‘natural’. Many hipsters appreciate this, tricked into a false sense of healthiness, but will often enthusiastically accept artificial colours in sweets (examples: unicorn cupcakes, rainbow layer cakes, and galaxy doughnuts).
At the Asana Farmers Market in Siem Reap, Cambodia, 2015, I created a sourdough doughnut affectionately called ‘Dragon Ball’. It featured a dragon fruit glaze spiced with Kampot black pepper, filled with a peppery chili ginger lime curd. In a crowd of doughnuts, the Dragon Ball stood out with its pop-py, lip gloss red colour—the prime reason why most of our customers tried it.
If you can’t apply bright, pop-py colours when creating your food, an alternative is to use contrasting colours to mimic the pop-py effect. An example of an Instagrammable food that relies on contrasting colours are charcoal bun burgers; paired with white sesame seeds, light coloured sauces or cheeses, these ingredients pop out against the dark, pitch black charcoal bun.
“Cherry on top.” As the saying goes, you can increase pop-py colours in your food by adding unnecessary garnishes, edible flowers, and utensils like cocktail straws. They don’t need to complement flavours—that’s not the point.
Weird Plates & Plating
Fancy, bougie restaurants understand the importance of plates and plating (how food is presented on the dish). In these restaurants morsels of food are often displayed on large pristine dishware. Not necessarily to emphasise how small the food is (it really is, though) but to direct your focus onto the subject. Similar to the function of thick white borders in a framed photograph.
However, Instagrammable foods challenges this status quo. Their plates and plating can be quirky to downright annoying and useless. Sometimes they’re not plates at all: wooden boards, frying pans, buckets, a slab of stone or a slice of log. Ultimately, for some Instagrammable foods, the objectives of plates and plating are to mock ordinary dining and stupefy viewers on social media.
Let’s take a look at our ‘Banana Almond Crumble Muffin’ below.
At our hipster cafe Bang Bang in 2021, our team designed a flamboyant-ish muffin with a banana leaf liner, featuring ingredients such as local bananas, cinnamon, almonds, streusel crumble, and wild honey icing. Here, it’s presented on a handcrafted shagreened ceramic plate. The plate can be damaged by a slight graze of a knife, and the banana leaf liner was impractical, but the overall look of the muffin was sooooo worth it.
DECADENCE
In context of Instagrammable food, decadence is rich, hefty, and so excessive that eating requires a strategy. Thoughts of cardiac arrest or diabetes may also enter your head when you look at it but you’re still tempted. Think freakshakes with piles of sweets on top of the milkshake, plus cookies, candies, and colourful sprinkles glued to the sides of the glass, or super sized burgers with multiple thick patties, gooey cheese, crispy bacon, and fried eggs between plump, fluffy brioche buns.
A dessert that fits this description of decadence was our ‘Sextuple Chocolate Cheesecake’ at our hipster cafe Bang Bang.
Using exclusively chocolate products from Wat Chocolate (the first and only company in Cambodia at the time to produce 100% Cambodian chocolate), our Sextuple Chocolate Cheesecake was an homage to a chocoholic’s fantasy:
- chocolate cookie crust
- chocolate cream cheese filling
- dark chocolate ganache
- cocoa powder dusting and chocolate shavings
- chocolate chip cream cheese frosting
- chocolate truffles coated with sweetened cocoa nibs
There is, however, a limit to decadence. If you surpass that limit, hipsters will feel disgusted at the mere sight of it. It’s difficult to pinpoint what those limits are in decadent foods but red flags to watch out for are:
- too many ingredients with conflicting flavours (cotton candy burritos)
- excess oils or fats (doughnut burgers)
- disturbing, non-edible objects (injectable doughnuts with syringes)
New But Familiar
In all examples of Instagrammable foods mentioned in this article, a common theme can be identified. When they were introduced to the public, they were considered new… but also familiar.
To create an Instagrammable food that crosses the borders between new and familiar, you must ensure:
- it isn’t too unique or abstract
- it features elements of recognisable comfort foods or guilty pleasure foods
At our hipster cafe Bang Bang, we had a menu of sandwiches inspired by the Louisianian po’ boy (a type of submarine sandwich) and Japanese katsu (crispy fried cutlet of meat or seafood, made with flaky Japanese panko breadcrumbs). It was served with our homemade purple sweet potato bun, with your choice of 4 different katsus (chicken, pork, tiger prawn, or pacific oysters) and 3 different dressings (sweet chili Cambodian Koh Kong sauce, sweet & sour Japanese tonkatsu sauce, or American pickle remoulade).
Particularly to our Cambodian and Japanese customers, the concept of our sandwiches wasn’t too foreign. The composition of the sandwich may be different but the presence of their comfort foods (deep fried chicken and seafood) was just enough to pique their interest.
Warning to creative cooks! Exercise your judgment and know your audience. An unusual mixture of comfort or guilty pleasure foods may enter the hazardous territory of tackiness or revulsion. Spaghetti doughnuts and s’mores fries are prime examples.