Halfway through dinner my lap was speckled with white crystals of salt dropped from the right hand of Salt Bae himself. Salt Bae hadn’t meant to salt my trousers, as far as I could tell. He was aiming for the rib-eye on the table in front of me at his new Midtown restaurant, Nusr-Et Steakhouse, but he had raised his fingers up to his scalp line before he allowed the salt to start its free fall, and a good deal of it had gone wide of the mark.

I was thrilled, of course. I had a souvenir of the gracefully stylized and mildly preposterous gesture that is the basis of Salt Bae’s fame, the source of his nickname, and the point of his restaurant. Of course, everybody in the dining room was there for souvenirs, but the other suckers would have nothing to show off but a photo or video. I had a pair of trousers that Salt Bae had seasoned like a steak.

The perceptive reader will have already spotted the flaw in my thinking. Because my souvenir would vanish the moment I stood up, the only way to show it off would have been calling my friends to come see me in my chair at Nusr-Et. So in the end I simply pointed my phone at my fly and snapped a picture.

A few years ago, restaurants were still a refuge from the electronic grid, places where we could eat and talk without converting existence into digital form. Phone cameras changed that, and now it often seems that the point of going out to eat is to post a digital image proving we were there.