Chefs are eager to play along, acting as stylists and studio assistants. Bonjwing Lee, a well-traveled photographer and writer whose Flickr stream and blog, the Ulterior Epicure, are required viewing for gastronauts, said a few chefs had asked his advice on “adjustments they could make to their dining rooms” so customers can take better photographs.

Restaurants, which have always tried to make food look pretty, don’t just want pictures that pop. They want to make food with enough razzle-dazzle to inspire its own hashtag; everybody wants to invent the next #cronut. Stunt dishes seem to be on the rise: the burger with a length of bone embedded in the patty at M. Wells Steakhouse; the chicken Parmesan on a pizza stand at Quality Italian; the tomahawk chop at Restaurant Marc Forgione, Costata and M. Wells Steakhouse, to name a few; and other plates so unreasonably large that diners now take pictures for the same reason fishermen do — to prove that, yes, it really was that big.

Just as there are levels of culinary ambition, there are levels of marketing. Many serious chefs would never stoop to trying to get a dish to go viral. A few even ban cameras from the dining room. But many others routinely assemble plates with a visual aesthetic meant to incite the admiration of cooks, critics and awards judges around the world. At the influential handful of restaurants pursuing a contemporary style, each plate plays to two audiences. One is you, with your napkin in your lap. The other is a global club whose members, checking out their phones or laptops, constitute an invisible gallery in the dining room.

Camera cuisine like this could be created in almost any style, but the one that happens to have been ascendant during the digital revolution in food photography is the New Nordic movement. Kitchens that glide in the tailwinds of adventurous Scandinavian chefs send out plates with a gentle, windswept look. Ingredients, invariably arranged on earthenware or wood or stone, seem to have washed in on a wave or blown in on a forest breeze. The nature-boy stylings make it clear that the chefs have been studying the images in René Redzepi’s Instagram account.

Image A baguette tinted with squid ink to resemble a razor clam from Atera. Credit... Karsten Moran for The New York Times

It’s much less clear that they’ve actually been eating Mr. Redzepi’s cooking. Not all the time, but often enough, the flavors aren’t as vivid as the image; they’re spectral, washed-out. Foraged plants and other ingredients sometimes seem chosen for size and color more than for taste. That borage flower or sweet potato leaf is almost never dressed in a vinaigrette, which would make it tastier but may also create a distracting glare for the lens and cause it to droop before its photo op.

The combinations often feel knocked together at random, as if the dishes were determined not by the chef’s palate but by a lottery. Why does the monkfish get a single roasted kale leaf while the Mangalitsa pork gets tiny cups of raw brussels sprout leaves? Why not the other way around? What kind of cooking is this?