The video called June the city’s best-kept secret, which came as news to the forty-three people who ate there every week.

It began outside, with a young man pointing at the blue door as if he had found it under several feet of earth.

“You have walked past this place a hundred times,” he said.

This was unlikely. June stood between a locksmith and a shop that sold lampshades. Nobody walked down Bell Street by accident. You went there because your key had snapped, your lamp had become depressing, or Nora was making the lemon chicken.

Inside, the young man filmed the pressed-tin ceiling, the seven tables, and Nora carrying a plate she had not known was evidence. He broke open a potato. Steam rose. He closed his eyes.

“I’m going to regret telling you about this.”

Nora watched the video after closing. It had 640,000 views.

“What happens now?” asked Eli, her waiter, who was nineteen and therefore understood catastrophe in units of engagement.

“Lunch,” Nora said.

At eleven forty-five the next morning, the first customers were already outside. By noon the line reached the lampshades. The locksmith came over to ask whether there had been an evacuation.

For three weeks, June served more people than it had in the previous three months. They arrived holding phones at chest height, following the blue dot toward the blue door. They asked for “the potato,” though potatoes had never appeared alone on the menu. They requested the table from the video. There were six possible tables from the video, depending on which edit they meant.

The success was not imaginary. Nora replaced the refrigerator that leaked into a roasting tray. She gave Eli more hours and hired his sister. She paid the fish supplier before he reminded her. Anyone who says money cannot buy happiness has never heard a restaurant refrigerator turn on the first time.

The trouble was that the room had changed jobs.

Before the video, June had been a place where people ate. After the video, it was a place where people had eaten online. New customers arrived with the strange fatigue of pilgrims reaching a shrine that already had excellent photographs. They compared their potatoes to the original potato. They complained that the table looked smaller. One woman asked Nora to bring the chicken back because her friend had not filmed the cut.

The old customers adapted badly.

Mr. Salazar, who came every Tuesday at six, began arriving at five-thirty, then five-fifteen. He had lived above the pharmacy for thirty-one years and considered reservations a system designed by people with assistants. For a month Nora squeezed him onto a corner of the bar. Then the bar became “the chef’s counter” on a dining app and was booked for six weeks.

“Very good,” he said when she told him. “I will make an appointment with my dinner.”

He said it pleasantly, which was worse.

June’s most photographed dish was not the lemon chicken. It was a baked cheese that Nora had put on the menu because the oven ran hot near the left wall. In person it was nice. On camera it performed miracles. The crust split. The center stretched. Steam appeared with the timing of a stage entrance.

By spring, the cheese was wrong for the weather, but removing it became impossible. People had travelled for it. One man said so with the moral authority of someone whose train had been delayed.

Nora kept serving winter until June.

The first truly bad night arrived on a Thursday. Every table was occupied, twelve people waited outside, and nobody in the room had taken a bite for almost four minutes. Arms hovered above plates. Phones adjusted. A small lamp moved from table to table because somebody had brought it to improve the food.

Through the window, Nora saw Mr. Salazar returning from the market. He slowed at the blue door. Eli lifted one finger to say it might only be twenty minutes. Mr. Salazar looked at the line, then at the dining room, where seven tables of hot food were waiting to become images.

He raised his shopping bag in salute and kept walking.

Nora went into the kitchen and removed the baked cheese from the menu.

Eli stared at her. “Tonight?”

“Now.”

“We have thirty-two orders.”

“Then we have thirty-two farewell performances.”

The complaints began before dessert. A woman showed Nora the video, as though presenting a legal precedent. A man asked whether the cheese would return tomorrow. Another wanted to know why the restaurant had not announced the change.

“Because it’s dinner,” Nora said.

This answer appeared in a review the next morning beneath one star.

June’s rating fell from 4.8 to 4.5. The line shortened to the locksmith. Nora changed the menu twice in one week, which confused the recommendation accounts. The spring peas did not stretch. A cold soup reflected the little lamp but offered no decisive moment of rupture. People still came, but fewer arrived already knowing what the evening was supposed to look like.

Nora took the bar off the booking app. She put three stools there and told Eli never to call it a chef’s counter again. The first was for collecting takeaway orders. The second was for anyone who lived close enough to worry about their food getting cold. The third was for Mr. Salazar, although this was not written down.

He returned on a Tuesday at six.

“I hear the famous cheese is gone,” he said.

“A tragedy.”

“I never liked it.”

“You ordered it every week.”

“I was supporting you.”

Nora served him the peas. He ate them without photographing anything.

By August, June’s rating had settled at 4.3. The refrigerator worked. The fish supplier remained paid. The restaurant was busy on Fridays, quiet on Mondays, and once again capable of changing its mind.

One final review arrived from a visitor who had crossed the city after seeing the old video.

“Food was good,” it said, “but honestly not worth travelling forty-five minutes for.”

Nora printed it and taped it above the stove.

On Tuesday, Mr. Salazar read it and took the third stool.