Sliding cold into someone’s DMs is fraught. It’s the modern-day party crash, made even more intrusive because there’s no door to slam in your face. Yet more of us are using direct messages on social media to contact chefs and restaurants in a bid to personalise or even secure a night out.

As the best restaurants in any city book out, and traditional online enquiries and booking systems become a scourge on our impatient ways, a snappy direct message on social media might seem like an easy loophole.

Done properly, a DM is a shortcut to intimacy, a modus operandi move to fast track a private moment, to escalate banter for the purpose of dating, friendship or flirting. It’s a way to take an otherwise public conversation somewhere private, and into one-on-one territory.

It makes sense that more of us use Instagram to reach out to a restaurant or cafe; after all, the platform is how many of us discover new places to go. For many businesses, social media is now a business strategy to reach more people, but it does blur the line on how open they are to reciprocated commentary and connections. Hospitality businesses often list an email or website link in their Instagram profiles to encourage further conversations, but many of us bypass the extra clicks and effort, and DM instead.

“Is your cafe dog friendly?,” one delicious. editor DMd recently when she was out of town. We would-be customers want to know if our local cafe is open this long weekend, if they do any vegan dishes, whether they have high chairs.

Not everyone is liking. Bar Planet, the martini bar on Sydney’s Enmore Road, receive DMs all the time, they told delicious., and the messages can be rude or pushy. Because it’s a short message, there’s rarely a please, thank you, or any niceties. Instead, they might get a demanding question as well as more follow ups.

Ross Lusted, chef and owner of Woodcut Restaurant within Crown Sydney, says he often receives DMs every couple of days from people wanting a reservation at the restaurant. “They DM the restaurant and then they DM me personally. I don’t respond because it’s the rudest and laziest way to make a reservation.”

But many would-be customers also want special treatment of some kind. “They want things – ‘I’m an influencer’ – and I just delete them. Or I tell them to contact Cru Media, which manages our marketing and PR,” says Lusted. “Every couple of days I get a request for something like making a cake for someone’s daughter’s 18th birthday. I even had one with a photograph of a dish that wasn’t from our restaurant asking us to make this when they came in.”

Whatever is being asked, DMs negate the formality appropriate for speaking to a business. It cuts through the noise and demands special treatment by jumping into someone’s phone. That might be welcome when you’re asking something of a business account, but less so when you breach the DMs of a chef personally.

Lusted at Woodcut says people often treat restaurants differently to how they do other types of businesses. “My dentist is on Instagram. Would I DM my dentist asking for an appointment? I have people asking whether I can cook dinner at their house for 20 people, which would be better to ask through the restaurant or via email. And they don’t leave contact details so I have to DM them back.”

DMs and social media are forums in which nobody has any respect for your time, says Lusted, and restaurants see the worst of it. “You don’t DM your mechanic, why are restaurants different? People expect the idea of hospitality to extend too far. If they don’t turn up for a booking they are surprised if they are charged. You have to turn up to an airline, why not a restaurant?”

There’s a sense of entitlement in the way people ask for things, says Lusted. “They don’t use niceties and get offended if you ignore them. It’s probably a generational thing. It’s amazing how fast they expect communication to be turned around, there’s no patience.”

Instagram, for one, thinks businesses should harness direct messages, and use them as a way to build personal relationships with customers and grow their business. On its tips page for businesses using Instagram, it recommends responding to messages in a timely manner, making every conversation count, and using automation features to increase efficiency.

The DM inbox is a private place, unless you’re a public figure or a business. We can’t use normal social cues when using it – emojis are an unsatisfactory substitute for body language. The best we can do is pretend this is IRL, or real life, and use appropriate niceties such as please and thank you accordingly. And if you are told to go elsewhere or another route then do so – after all, you have turned up unannounced.

When the weekend is looming and there are no reservations in town, DMs can help you get the table booked, the gathering sorted, the job done. Indeed, six chefs were DMd in the writing of this article.

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