A POSH restaurant is proving to be a popular spot for Instagram-friendly photos – even though its owners say they take cheeky steps to stop them.
Victor Lugger and Tigrane Seydoux own Jacuzzi in Kensington, London.
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Their parent group Big Mamma has more than 500,000 followers on Instagram and visitors regularly share pics from their meals.
However the owners say they don’t design their restaurants to be magnets for social media content.
Lugger told The Times: “We don’t make our restaurants like Jacuzzi because we want them to be instagrammable. We do this because we want to make incredibly beautiful restaurants.
“In just the same way we try to make restaurants that create a great atmosphere, where you feel good.”
Lugger said he cheekily tries to put influencers off from posting pics at their tables.
“And, by the way, at night we always dim all the lights in our restaurants,” he said.
“And the darkness makes things really difficult to photograph… it drives [social media influencers] a little bit crazy”.
And the restaurant certainly is grand.
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The 170-seat Jacuzzi opened recently in a former NatWest bank on Kensington High Street and its 4,000 sq ft is decked out in a Sixties Venetian palazzo style and seems to offer not just food for the stomach but also a feast for the eyes.
Inside the dining room there’s alabaster on the walls and a high ceiling complete with a chandelier made of 1,000 little bottles.
There’s also a huge, retractable sky-dome roof and a specially planted alberto di limone spreading out over the staircase.
Even the toilets have been compared to a disco.
The Big Mamma restaurant group has 22 similar places around Europe with eateries in Paris, Madrid and Berlin.
Their style has been described as “pleasantly deranged” and “kitsch, orchestrated chaos”.
The Times said: “Jacuzzi feels like how the best Italian disco sounds: funky and smoochy. Snoggable.”
Lugger said: “We create an experience. It’s about food. And wine. It’s the waiters. The music is important too. Every detail is important.”
He added: “We try to make restaurants that create a great atmosphere, where you feel good.
“We try to create dishes that, beyond just tasting incredibly good and creating in your brain a truly Italian sensation, create a positive emotion, and this is usually a dish that does look good and photogenic too.”
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