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What top London chefs really think about Instagram (Getty Images) Heston Blumenthal is famously exacting about the dining experience. He tries to create “sensory memories”, controlling not only the way his dishes look and taste, but what his diners are listening to while they eat. His The Sound of the Sea, a signature dish at The Fat Duck, came with an iPod Nano playing, well, the sound of the sea. But there was a problem: he was struggling to control the temperature of the food when it actually entered the mouths of those diners, not through any fault of the kitchen, but because people were too busy taking pictures for Instagram. ....
When Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People was published back in 2018, the angst -ridden, coming-of-age love story quickly hit bestseller lists and seemed ideal fodder for the middle class, millennial dinner party set. So far, so Man Booker prize nominee. Yet when the miniseries aired on the BBC, a population in enforced lockdown for the previous four weeks, 5 days and 12 hours was searching – nay, yearning – for escape. And along came Connell. The enigmatic and emotionally distant heartbreaker, played by newcomer Paul Mescal, suddenly became the focus of the nation’s pent-up lust in a series of too-tight school uniform shirts, short shorts and, well, not much else, in Marianne’s bedroom, in the shower, in her friend’s swimming pool, in her kitchen… you get the drift. More extraordinary still was Connell’s humble little necklace – dismissed as Argos chic’ by one of Marianne’s friends – and worn by Mescal in every episode. An ordinary, unassu ....