Influencers: leave your ring light at home.

Yes, even YOU.

Last year, I went out to eat with an influencer. She took out her ring light in the middle of dinner to snap a photo. I took it out of her hands and said, “Put that away.” She told me, “Nobody minds,” obviously upset that I didn’t want her to use it.

When the chef came over to say hi to us (ring light safely hidden in her purse), I asked him how he felt about ring lights.

“We hate them,” he said. The influencer went red. I wasn’t calling her out at the table in front of him. But… we all know I’m a little confrontational and I was trying to prove a point.

When that chef walked away, I said to her, “The reason why no one has told you it bothers them before is because you’re making a promo video for them. They’re worried you won’t post it if they ask you to stop. Or worse, that you’ll tear them down.”

It was a tense dinner. We had different ideas of what is best for restaurants, as wildly different content creators. She still posts ring light videos; I wouldn’t be caught dead with one. (Though, there is one in my bathroom, because sometimes when you’re plucking your eyebrows, it helps.) Last week, I accidentally took a flash photo in a Michelin starred restaurant and did not stop apologizing.

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I’ve been thinking about this because when I was at Minari recently (see my update on why I can’t go back here), I was flashed by a ring light. Someone turned it on facing me and then moved it down to take a photo. A staff member said something to that guest and they turned it off, but when the staff person walked away, they turned it back on. At brunch!!! A time when you can sit by a window and capture photos with natural light.

It’s not the only time this has happened to me there. I’ve been flashed with ring lights at Minari more than I have at every other restaurant combined, not just at tables, but in the back by the bathrooms, too.

Minari is a beautiful restaurant. I understand the desire to document it. But some of the beauty is the darkness. Minari is a classic DDP restaurant, built around the light. For those of you who don’t know who DDP is, that’s Daniel del Prado. He has a lot of restaurants. And love him, hate him, or boycott him (I’m in the boycott him camp), he builds beautiful restaurants. During the day (or on long summer nights), his restaurants gleam from big windows. In the winter, they have this signature feel of sexy, cozy, wintery sparkle.

Real candles, uplighting, and some kind of iconic color make his restaurants stand out. They have these beautiful signature bars that take up a lot of space and the materials aren’t cheap like many new builds are—they feel built to last (though his views on workers appear incredibly outdated).

But influencers seem to think that getting their photo or video is better than being a part of that experience. In fact, it’s so important that they’ll shatter your experience for their video.

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What’s even more interesting to me though is that when I posted on Instagram looking for real-life experiences people had of being disrupted by ring lights, influencer after influencer DMed me with some kind of message like this, “Most people are annoying with their ring lights, but I’m not.”

I heard the tricks people use to make them less prominent: sitting in corners, body blocking, holding your hands around the light, having your boyfriend stand up over you and using a blanket to cover you??? (this is real and so intrusive), etc. But all of those measures affirm what we all already know: influencers know ring lights are disruptive and they just don’t care.

Look, influencers: the hard reality is nobody wants ring lights in a restaurant. Not chefs. Not guests. And it’s not just with other influencers, but also with you.

The hard reality is also that some of the influencers who told me they were not disruptive with their ring lights were named by chefs and front-of-house staff when I asked them to anonymously and off the record tell me who their experience was about.

I asked over 50 chefs and front-of-house managers if they want ring lights in their space. 0 said yes.

No one said, “This one person did an okay job with their ring light this one time.” They all would just rather not have them.

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Most of the people I asked had horror stories of rigs that people put up in their restaurants, like server Jaide T. who said, “I served the same Minneapolis influencer at two different restaurants. Both times their equipment included a standing ring light, a portable ring light attached to their phone, along with a red light that almost looks like a paper scanner. The set up took up a decent amount amount of space. They would point their flash camera at my face and simultaneously while asking if they could film me as I dropped off their dishes. Both times I kindly said I would prefer for my face to not be filmed, which they kindly obliged but seemed surprised. I think there was an expectation for the server to do anything to assist in the promotion of the influencers content rather than just having an authentic experience.”

I actually ran into this influencer at dinner and truly believed, based on the rig, that this person was a professional photographer hired by the restaurant. When my server started apologizing to me about the lights, I asked her, “Is that just an influencer?” She nodded and said, “I would tell them to turn it off if my boss let me.”

She comped two of our dishes. She also comped dishes of every table around that influencer, meaning that influencer filming cost the restaurant money. It was so invasive and intrusive. It was one of the most uncomfortable dinners of my life both because of the light but also because our server had to ask us to move every single time she needed to move by us because the ring light couldn’t move. It had to stay in place.

Another time, at a restaurant in New York, a bartender calmly and clearly explained to a woman using a ring light to get a photo of a viral martini that the ring light was bothering other guests. When she turned to me with a wide smile to ask me if I minded, she realized quickly she picked the wrong direction to turn. “Yes,” I said. She expected me to say no and was mad that I said yes. I didn’t say it meanly, but I had been sitting by her ring light for 5 minutes while she took photographs of a martini.

Chef Sam Hart of Counter- in Charlotte said, “It’s so distracting to everyone. Mainly guests. Yes, your dinner is about you and your guests, but the entire restaurant is not there only for you versus the rest of the guests.”

This is one thing that comes up again and again about ring lights in restaurants: they break the intimacy and people seem to forget that these are public spaces.

Sometimes, I wonder if influencers stop and think about the impact their ring light has on a space. Might someone not come back because of it? Are you making it harder for the people around you to work?

Chef Telly Justice from HAGS in NYC speaks to this more eloquently. Chef Justice said, “We have a very small, intimate dining room. That smallness and intimacy is the draw of the space in a lot of ways. It allows us the opportunity to build meaningful, personal relationships with each guest and serve them in a way that considers the whole of their needs. Ring lights are an enemy to intimacy in a small space and make our job much more difficult.”

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I love this quote. “Ring lights are the enemy of intimacy.”

For me, that is the appeal of HAGS. It’s why I go. I like taking kind of bad photos of (very good) food by the light of a teeny tiny heart-shaped lamp on the table. It feels more real, more organic. The photos have this pink tint. So, too, with my favorite pizza restaurant, Good Times. The light above the bar is red meaning there is no way to get a good photograph of their pizza without walking to the window. It seems baked in, intentional, and in a world where restaurants are now built with spotlights over the table, I love it when restaurants take on an anti-photogenic design. They’re asking you to be present very directly with their lighting.

Food critics used to take pride in the fact that their photos were bad. Multiple food critics listed something in their bio about the horrible photos that they took. The point is that they were recommending restaurants to you and photography wasn’t their skill set. Now the people recommending restaurants to you are people who know how to make flashy videos. Are some of those people also adept at figuring out which dishes are the best on the menu? Maybe. But they don’t eat their way through the entire menu to be able to tell you.

Influencers normally go once very early in a restaurant’s tenure. They light the place up. They break the intimacy of the restaurant. Then they disappear. They tell you to go there without actually knowing what it’s like to eat there.

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When I beg people to stop taking recommendations from influencers, it’s not because I’m a curmudgeon, it’s because they legitimately don’t know if a restaurant is special or not when they’re spending 20 minutes setting up their rig, asking if they can film staff, eating food 10 minutes after it was dropped to them, eating 1/4 of every dish, and searching for virality.

They’re not looking out for the best place for you to eat at. They’re trying to find the best places to film at for their content and engagement, as a way to collect more followers.

It’s the number one thing influencers in public say to me: if I made video content, I would have more followers. But that’s not who I am. I’m here to be the woman who knows restaurants inside and out in a world where most people recommending restaurants only go once or twice. I’m not making a video. I’m making a recommendation and I do my best not to be wrong.

Knowing a restaurant only comes from the slow and sometimes painful work of eating at a restaurant over and over and over.

It’s including the dishes that aren’t winners in your review and especially looking for the dishes that you think people won’t order, but should. It’s about getting to know the names of the staff who work at that restaurant, blending into the background, listening to the people around you, and legitimately going out to dinner with no agenda. But it’s also about looking up and around.

For every single piece I write, at least once, I leave my notebook at home and my phone in the car. I sit there and just feel the restaurant. It’s a living, breathing thing, and it’s magic to be a part of it. Front-of-house workers get to know me, not because I’m extra chatty, but because I keep coming back. I’m not asking for anything from a restaurant, not special treatment, not the ability to break the intimacy, I’m just there for dinner (sometimes with a notebook and a couple of questions).

Ring lights are an intrusion into the restaurant space. They transform it—and not for the better.

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Chef Ian Graye from Pietramala said to me about ring lights, “It’s actually never happened here. They would have to notify me before and come during a weekday at first seating or I wouldn’t allow it.” Then a few minutes later, “Actually, I'd probably just say no.” It was the first time anyone said this to me. In fact, only two chefs said this to me: Chef Ian Graye and Chef Jason Vincent of Giant and Pizza Matta. When I asked Vincent the same question I asked countless chefs about what he does when there are ring lights in his restaurant he said, “We just ask them to put it away.”

I asked a lot of chefs if they would feel comfortable doing that—and most of them said they were afraid. One chef in NYC told me that when The VIP List came in, they were so disruptive that (and this is a quote), “It was worse than when we had someone choke in the restaurant.” I said, “You’re joking.” He said, “Absolutely not.” These are the people you’re taking restaurant recommendations from. When I asked him why he didn’t say anything he just sent me one single video of their content where they tore a restaurant down. “Fair,” I said.

When I asked Chef Vincent what he would say to other chefs who told me they were afraid to ask influencers to put down their ring lights, he said, “Talk to everyone like they’re a human being.” It’s a simple concept, but it seems like in 2025, influencers seem to think they’re beyond that and restaurants kind of rely on them because people (for the most part) have stopped reading food writing and replaced their recommendations with viral videos.

And so, if you also wish there were fewer ring lights in restaurants, you have to take it into your own hands and find other ways to find new restaurants other than these flashy videos. You can tell if there’s a ring light or flash on a video—it’s easy. If you see it? Unfollow.

And hey, influencers: ask for a window seat when the sun is still up. Your photos will look better there anyway.