Days before the doors had officially opened at Nobu Toronto in August, TikTok was already inundated with videos documenting a night out at the luxury Japanese restaurant chain’s first Canadian outpost.
“See the little flowers on there?” one influencer says, holding a blossom-garnished salmon taco so close to her phone’s camera that it goes out of focus. Another pans over tightly wrapped maki rolls and says, “I think we probably got the two most basic rolls, but I love a California roll.”
Some videos are wordless montages set to music by PartyNextDoor or The Kid LAROI: sweeping shots of the restaurant’s swanky interior, a few seconds where the camera lingers over an overexposed plate of Nobu’s signature miso-marinated black cod.
Ten years ago, the big media get for a restaurant like Nobu would have been a rave review in a city magazine or newspaper. But the food media landscape has been completely overhauled. Influencers’ brief videos about restaurants have supplanted the 1,000-word verdicts from the critics who prided themselves in maintaining their anonymity, distancing themselves from chefs and restaurateurs and paying for their own meals.
This changing of the guard has made restaurant coverage far more inclusive and accessible, highlighting the immigrant-run eateries and fast food joints that were seldom covered by traditional critics. But it’s also raised questions of who gets to call themselves a critic. Plenty of food influencers derive some or all of their income promoting restaurants. Can a review be trusted if a content creator was invited by a restaurant, had their meal covered or received payment for a post?
Tasheka Mason had 1 minute and 40 seconds to sum up her experience at Chambers, a downtown Toronto steakhouse. She sat in her car, her favourite place to do voiceovers, and began narrating the edited video of her visit.
“The aesthetic is very aesthetic-y,” she said with a thick Jamaican accent, “the cocktails were extremely cocky,” and the steak? “The marble, the char, lookit that steak had the cow stop moo long time.” She disparaged the saltiness of the vegetables but praised the cleanliness of the bathroom.
The TikTok influencer then posted her review to her account tashthemillionaire, which has nearly 118,000 followers.
Ms. Mason’s content, characterized by her fast, quippy and blunt delivery and the often harsh light cast by the mobile LED lamp she uses in dark restaurants, isn’t popular in spite of its improvisational nature, but because of it. It’s meant to be amateurish, to signal authenticity.
“When I started this, the original plan was to do five-star restaurants … and to engage an audience with the Jamaican patois, the Jamaican sounds, with the Jamaican mannerisms, and showing people that we’re all here, we’re all at these fancy restaurants, we’re all having a good time,” she says.
The populist appeal of creators like Ms. Mason is in part a reaction to the way restaurant criticism was seen for a long time as “elitist, snobby and pretentious,” says Emily Contois, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa who has studied the evolution of food media.
Food historians largely credit the New York Times’s Craig Claiborne for creating the modern critic in the 1960s: someone who prided themselves on visiting restaurants multiple times, accepted no freebies and masked their identity to ensure they did not receive special treatment.
But, Prof. Contois points out, “it was often a white man trained in a particular tradition, who wrote in a particular way, judged in a particular way.”
In the mid-aughts, Yelp and Chowhound became spaces where regular people could publish their own experiences dining out. The newspaper critic could be an imposing figure in the restaurant world, but now so was the petty Yelp reviewer.
As ad revenue at newspapers and magazines dried up, restaurant reviews were replaced with sponsored listicles of a city’s 10 best patios.
Yelp paved the way for content creators to wield more influence, but unlike traditional critics, there’s no established framework for how they do their jobs. Some only do paid posts, while others are happy with a free meal. Some pay for the suburban strip mall meals they review, but will also create ads for fast food chains.
Samantha Levin built up her following of 8,500 on TikTok and 20,000 on Instagram focusing on Vancouver cafes and restaurants. She’d post sun-dappled clips panning across a cafe’s seating area or a glass display of viennoiserie – all without ever having direct contact with the businesses. Now they reach out to her in hopes she’ll feature them in one of her video vignettes as a paid partnership. Sometimes those coordinated visits generate an enthusiastic recommendation; if she’s unimpressed, she deletes the footage.
“If it was a negative experience, then I won’t post about it because being honest and authentic and being positive is important to me,” she says.
Ms. Mason, meanwhile, says she has no reservations about critiquing a restaurant, even if she’s been compensated. She says she’s clear with restaurants that they can’t give her a script.
Pete Wells, who recently stepped down as the New York Times’s restaurant critic after a 12-year run, witnessed firsthand the growing influence of influencers in the space he and other critics had once dominated.
His contract with his readers was not to steer them wrong and ruin their night out and that requires a firm boundary between the critic and restaurant, he says.
“Once they’ve got you in the door, they’ve already bought you,” he explains. “Whether you have some reservations about some menu item or another is irrelevant.”
When Cassie Prosper, the director of NorthPR’s hospitality division, began working in restaurant public relations a decade ago, dealing with old-school critics was tricky: they wielded enormous power but restaurants couldn’t host them or control their message. Things are different now, as she increasingly manages relationships with influencers.
When her client J’s Steak Frites was set to open its first location, Ms. Prosper’s firm pitched it to established food media and a long list of influencers. The restaurant hosted an opening party for influencers (now an industry norm), generating pre-opening publicity.
The gimmick of only having steak frites on the menu generated TikTok buzz that eventually became self-referential. In a video with 358,000 views posted months after the restaurant’s opening, an influencer says, “J’s Steak Frites. We saw this place blow up on TikTok and couldn’t wait to check it out.”
But not everyone is susceptible to influencer posts. Seeing a flurry of videos of creators visiting the same new restaurants in Toronto can be a deterrent for Samiya Hassan.
“When you see these influencer events for these restaurants that open, they’re usually posted a week before and you can tell right away that all these influencers were hosted and it was purely to get the hype,” she says.
There are only a handful of creators Ms. Hassan follows that cut through the social media noise, she says, highlighting hidden gems in the suburbs or cuisines from parts of the world she’s never tried.
Keith Lee, with 16.6 million followers on TikTok, is one of them. Most of the Las Vegas creator’s reviews are filmed in selfie-mode in his car, where he eats dumplings, birria tacos and jerk chicken — usually from small or family-run joints — out of takeout containers. He pays for the food himself, but will send family members to do the pick-up to avoid being recognized.
He is constantly asked by struggling restaurants to stop by when he visits their city since it can have the same transformational effect as a four-star review in the New York Times (Toronto takeaway spot Afro’s Pizza said it was “dangerously overwhelmed” after Mr. Lee posted about it earlier this year).
Ms. Hassan says she doesn’t need someone to be an academic, have a strong culinary background or the experience of eating at 10 Michelin-starred restaurants in order to be qualified to write restaurant reviews.
“I would rather talk to someone who has diversity in where they go and can be more inclusive about it,” she said. “When I think of a food critic, I think of the past.”
Earlier this month, Mr. Lee broke from what his followers had come to expect and paid a visit with his family to Nobu’s Chicago location. He did not consume the meal in his car, he spent US$1,079.77 and found the food overrated, giving the toro tartare with caviar 5 out of 10.
A commenter scolded him, “come on, Nobu doesnt need any help bro, what are you doing.”
