Decide what the photos have to do before you pick the dishes
A new website build wants wide landscape frames with breathing room for headline text. A Deliveroo listing wants tight, bright, near-square crops that still read as food at thumbnail size on a phone. A press pack wants clean backgrounds and full-resolution files. Those are three different shoots, and shooting all three at once is fine as long as I know before I set up.
I once spent a morning in a Clerkenwell dining room producing moody, low-key plates, only to be told at the end that everything was going on a menu printed in single-colour black. Beautiful shadows, useless menu. One sentence from the owner would have prevented it. Write that sentence: homepage hero, six dishes for the new menu PDF, twenty for the delivery apps, twelve verticals for Instagram. That line does more work than a whole Pinterest board.
Choose dishes that earn their slot
Not every plate deserves a photograph. Send me your top sellers by revenue, not the chef’s favourites; they are rarely the same list. Then add anything visually distinctive, because a plate of beige braise photographs like a plate of beige braise no matter who is holding the camera.
- Four to six hero dishes that define the menu
- Two or three drinks, ideally one with ice and condensation
- One dessert, one side, one bread or snack
- Two or three room and detail shots for atmosphere
Twelve to sixteen dishes is realistic in a half day. Anyone promising thirty in four hours is either shooting everything from one angle on a windowsill or has not costed their editing time.
Tell me every crop you need, including the delivery apps
This is the part restaurants forget, and it is the part that causes reshoots. Deliveroo and Uber Eats both want the dish filling the frame on a plain surface, evenly lit, no cutlery crowding the edges, and they will reject a moody hero shot that looks stunning on your homepage. I shoot those as a separate pass with the camera locked off and a second light in, rather than trying to crop a website image down.
| Where it is used | Crop | How I shoot it | Typical count |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website hero, Google Business Profile | 16:9 and 3:2 landscape | Wide, negative space left for text | 4-6 |
| Printed menu and press | 4:3 or square, full resolution | Straight-on or top-down, clean background | 6-10 |
| Deliveroo and Uber Eats | Square, dish fills frame | Flat even light, no competing props | 15-25 |
| Instagram feed | 4:5 vertical | Framed loose so the crop is safe | 10-15 |
| Reels and Stories | 9:16 | Motion, hands in frame, shot alongside stills | 6-10 |
I shoot verticals and 4:5 simultaneously wherever I can, by framing wider than I need and cropping in the edit. It costs nothing on the day and doubles what you can use.
Book the slot outside service, and be honest about the kitchen
Nine in the morning to one in the afternoon is the sweet spot for most London restaurants. The kitchen has prep running, the pass is clear, and nobody is shouting. Between lunch and dinner works too, though the team is usually flatter by then. Shooting during service is a bad idea for everyone, and I will generally decline it — the food gets rushed, the chef is quite reasonably prioritising paying customers, and the results show it.
Tell me who is plating. If it is a junior on prep rather than the head chef, I need to know, because plating for camera is a different skill and I will be directing more.
Plating for camera is not plating for a table
A dish plated for a diner is built to be eaten. A dish plated for camera is built to be looked at from one specific angle, usually about thirty degrees above the plate. The garnish goes on the side facing the lens. The sauce gets spooned where the light will catch it. The portion is often slightly smaller so the plate does not look crowded.
Good chefs pick this up in about two dishes. Some hate it, and I understand why — it feels like lying. It is not, as long as the food on the plate is the food you serve. My rule is simple: same ingredients, same portion size, better arrangement.
Gloss, glycerin and the three seconds of steam
Here is an unpopular opinion: most of the food styling tricks people expect are either obsolete or a waste of a shoot slot. Glycerin sprayed on vegetables looks like glycerin sprayed on vegetables. Mashed potato standing in for ice cream is a 1980s catalogue trick and modern audiences spot it instantly. I would rather cook a second portion.
Steam is the honest exception. Real steam is visible for roughly three seconds and only against a dark background with light coming from behind it. So we plate, I get the light in position first, the dish comes out last, and we shoot fast. If a restaurant wants steam on twelve dishes, that is a different conversation about time.
Light in a basement dining room
Half the interesting restaurants in Soho and Shoreditch are underground, and in November the natural light in a basement room is gone by two in the afternoon and was never much good to begin with. I bring lights to every food job for that reason. A window is lovely when it exists, but relying on it means your shoot is hostage to London weather, and a set of twenty dishes shot across changing daylight will not match when they sit next to each other on a menu page.
Consistency across the set matters more than any single frame being spectacular. That is the argument for a professional over a keen phone photographer, and honestly it is the only argument that holds up.
If it were my restaurant
If you are opening a restaurant with a limited budget, I would book one half day, shoot twelve to fourteen dishes properly with every crop delivered, and skip the interiors until the room is finished and full. Empty dining rooms photograph as empty dining rooms. Then book a second half day three months later once the menu has settled, rather than spending double on day one for dishes that will be gone by autumn.
If you need social content as well, shoot stills and video on the same visit. The lighting is already up, the chef is already in the zone, and the marginal cost of adding restaurant video to a photo day is far lower than booking a separate crew. The formats worth capturing are covered in my guide to Instagram reels for London restaurants.
What it costs and what you get back
Restaurant photography starts at £400 for a half day in London, with most full-menu shoots landing between £600 and £900 once delivery-app sets and interiors are included. Edited files come back within a week, tagged by dish and sorted by crop so your marketing person is not renaming two hundred files. For how that sits against everything else, my London photographer rates round-up has the full picture.
Most of my food work is within a short drive of the studio, so if you are an East London restaurant there is rarely a travel charge. Send the dish list and a rough date over on the contact page, and you’ll have an honest half-day-or-full-day answer by the next working day.