In 2017, two aspiring YouTubers going by the name Topjaw published a video posing the London foodie’s most important question: what to eat in Chinatown? They enlisted the help of longtime Instagrammer Kar-Shing Tong (better known by his username @ks_ate_here), who took them on a lovingly curated loop of the neighbourhood. Cantonese siu mei duck at Four Seasons, Chongqing-style handmade noodles at the now defunct Little Wooden Hut, and Barshu on Frith Street, where they decadently cracked a whole crab for the camera. Any of the 100,000-odd viewers who watched it at the time would be well served by its responsible (if unspectacular) recommendations. But in retrospect, the video may be of more interest to historians. In its unassuming and rapidly cut seven minutes, you can almost see the tectonic plates of the food world begin to shift.
Tong is the elder statesman: the @ks_ate_here account began in the social media dark ages, first on Twitter then on an Instagram that was dominated by static photography. He’s in his element in the video, dutifully explaining the history and technique behind the dishes. He is relaxed and affable in front of the camera, but in his own work he doesn’t show his face often – it just wasn’t the style. Topjaw is something different. Nine years ago, it was still embryonic: host Jesse Burgess sweating profusely at any hint of chilli, cameraman Will Warr unable to use chopsticks. But the formula was there. The constant checking in to see if what they’re eating truly is “the best”. Even doubled over from the heat of a spicy fish soup, Burgess’s eyes always find the camera. He holds out food for inspection and addresses the imagined viewer. The audience is out there. “KS has 40,000 Instagram followers! 40,000!” Burgess says, pointing at Tong with aspirational glee.
Now, Topjaw – buoyed partly by their own charms and partly by the tech industry’s hard turn to short-form video – has 1.7 million followers across the major platforms. But it’s not a singular phenomenon. The algorithm now serves up an influencer for every genre of restaurant, from halal to fine dining. The most popular account in the UK – with 2.4 million followers on Instagram and 1.2 million on TikTok – is Eating With Tod, featuring the preternaturally excitable Toby Inskip, who rubs his hands together and hangs his mouth open in gluttonous ecstasy behind gargantuan mounds of roasted and fried meats. Rollin Lee goes deep on Korean food and culture. The landscape skews depressingly male among the largest accounts, but Lylaa Ali Shaikh of @SaltandShaikh promises a guide to the “ethnic hot girl spots in London”, while Kate Ovens mixes restaurant reviews with the occasional – stunningly impressive – competitive eating challenge.
The rise of these influencers, in the half-decade since the pandemic, initially caught the restaurant world off-guard. Asma Khan told me that her Soho restaurant, Darjeeling Express, was busy for four months after appearing in a Topjaw video. Man Hon Luk, of Hon’s BBQ, said that, in one day, 200 people came to his pop-up in Hackney after he was featured on Inskip’s “Best BBQ” series. The rise of the food influencers has also disrupted the food media world, equalling or supplanting traditional media critics as the dominant force in restaurant coverage. As Hannah Twiggs, the food and drink editor of the Independent told me, one reel by Inskip alone could reach a larger audience than the circulation of the entire print media in the UK.
Over the past few months I’ve spoken to more than 50 influencers, chefs, restaurateurs, PR professionals and other industry players to find out where influencers came from, how they gained this position in the restaurant world and how the business of influencing works day-to-day. I’ve learned that while some restaurateurs and PRs claim influencers are a plague of locusts with ring lights, many more see them as a form of cheap advertising. The most striking thing I learned was that very few influencers have been able to translate their viewers into steady paychecks. They battle to be invited to exclusive launches, while also trying to hawk themselves to brands for potentially lucrative partnership deals. It is also clear that there is a secretive trade involving some influencers taking under-the-table payments from restaurants in return for positive coverage, blurring the line between entertainment and advertising, and certainly violating the UK’s advertising standards rules. While influencers’ audiences are continuing to grow, their relentless positivity and seemingly total lack of critical faculty has led to a viewer backlash that one influencer described to me as a “crisis of authenticity”.
Through means both shady and legitimate, the influencer is the current kingmaker of the food scene in the British capital. This is the story of how it happened, how long it can last and who, at the end of the day, is paying for all this content.
Every technological leap in the history of the internet has brought about a new way to talk about food, and expanded the audience for content. But it wasn’t until the late era of restaurant blogs, in the second half of the 2000s, that the industry began to reckon with the growing power of the social internet and tried to turn it to its advantage. The blog names were punny (Oliver Thring’s Thring for Your Supper launched in 2008) or twee (Chris Pople’s Cheese and Biscuits, launched in 2007), and they generally did what the traditional food media already did – reviewed restaurants, shared recipes, photographed meals – only in a more spirited, anarchic and amateur way.
In 2009, the restaurant writer Tim Hayward (then a contributor to the Guardian) and the PR firm owner Sarah Canet held a summit for bloggers and restaurant PRs at the five-star The Rubens at the Palace, across from Buckingham Palace. The point, according to attenders, was to come to an understanding. Many PRs found bloggers amateurish and impudent, too ready to generate notoriety for themselves by slagging off their client restaurants. The bloggers, in general, felt they were treated like childish blaggers or free advertising billboards. Linda Williams, a blogger who attended the event, said that the PR industry seemed to think bloggers would be more pliable than “real” journalists, while bloggers “wanted to preserve their own voice, not be told what they have to say”.
Another development was about to change the lay of the land. In 2010, Instagram launched; by the end of 2014 it had more than 300 million users. Meticulously posed shots of food were an early hit on the platform. Tong and an anonymous account who goes by Clerkenwell Boy (real name Tim) were early stalwarts of the scene. Tong recalls being given the moniker “the food porn king” – a reference to his penchant for closeups of the goods – while Clerkenwell Boy was the master of the “table lay” or “flat lay”, the shot-from-above foodscapes that were the dominant visual form in the latter half of the decade. Helen Graves, who was a food blogger at the time, recalls people standing up on chairs in restaurants and cafes to get the bird’s-eye view needed to shoot the perfect lay. Chefs were aghast.
In 2014, Instagram co-founder and then-CEO Kevin Systrom invited Clerkenwell Boy out for lunch to talk about food content on the platform. One of the obvious hitches was that there was no money in it. Influencers like Clerkenwell Boy and Tong had amassed followings in the tens of thousands, but Instagram did not pay creators for views, and “branded content” was still in its infancy. However, the PR industry already knew that whatever the platform, internet stars could be a valuable conduit to the public – and they wanted a good relationship with Instagrammers. What emerged was a chummy quid pro quo.
“From 2015 the free meal exchange really starts,” said Tong, referring to the general agreement that Instagrammers would trade coverage for free meals. This represented a great deal for the industry, given that an outright marketing campaign could cost thousands of pounds. Soon every savvy PR was cultivating a stable of Instagrammers to send to restaurants. “The return on investment is incredible, right? We were going in for a freebie meal, maybe worth a hundred quid, and [the restaurant gets] instant coverage – thousands, tens of thousands of followers, see it,” Tong said.
Naturally, this helped set the dominant tone of restaurant coverage as positive. Many bloggers thought of themselves as amateur critics, but the Instagrammers were something different. As Henry Taylor of Kitchen Communications put it, influencers stepped into the gap left by “the decline of general restaurant coverage” – not reviews, but positive features covering new openings, high-personality chefs and emerging trends in the food world. But there are plenty in the industry who took a more jaundiced view, seeing influencers as little more than an extension of an advertising budget. One PR, who works for a large restaurant group in London, told me: “It’s never been the case that I say, if I invite someone, they have to give positive coverage – it’s not spelled out like that. But it is kind of how it works.” Anyone who persistently posted negative coverage would see their gratis meals drying up quickly. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” the PR said.
Another prominent PR told me that pre-pandemic, they often used influencers as a plan B if the usual routes to coverage weren’t working. “We were really snooty about bloggers and Instagrammers,” they told me. “We treated them like shit, really. Then the followings started going way up and we realised it was time to take them seriously.”
This is the landscape in which the modern food influencer emerged. If the development of social media had felt just about linear enough to comprehend during the 2010s, by the 2020s it was something else entirely. Instagram introduced the algorithmic timeline in 2016, and each subsequent year intensified the amount of unsolicited content it forced through users’ feeds. Under pressure from TikTok, the entire social media industry moved aggressively into short-form video content. Meta has the most transparent numbers here: it launched Reels in 2020, and by 2022 Reels’ ad revenue was about $2bn. By last year, Mark Zuckerberg said it was set to make $50bn, and Meta released viewership stats showing that about 50% of all time on Instagram is spent on Reels. It is this shift that created the modern food influencer: at the outset of 2023, Topjaw had a modest Instagram follower count in the mid-tens of thousands, while Eating With Tod’s Instagram count was about 150,000.
The most significant change was the new power and opacity of the algorithm. Many influencers described trying to intuit the behaviour favoured by the algorithm – voiceovers, text across the frame, holding the camera up and away from the body for an opening shot, quick cuts between courses, ultra-closeups of food, lists – fast enough to reap the rewards, and these quickly became part of the influencer vernacular. Shaikh described posting a 10-second clip of her eating desserts with a soundtrack of an already viral song, and waking up to millions of views – a result she found baffling. Topjaw noted that their most successful posts – the series that blew their channel up in 2024 – were not their thoughtful long-form restaurant mini-docs, but the fast-cut reels in which they interviewed chefs and celebrities about their favourite places to eat in London. As Burgess pointed out to me, in the 250 episodes of this mini-series aired to date, no food is even shown.
The influencers who built huge followings before the pandemic have been left behind by the algorithm. “You look at those early guys who were like kings then, but they don’t get any views now, there’s no engagement,” James Dimitri, who has 300,000 Instagram followers, told me. What is immediately obvious is that while the first wave of food influencers rarely appeared in their posts, the new scene is all about the personalities. What people – or the algorithm – really want is not pictures of food, but to see their favourite influencer eating or talking about food. A former advertising executive at a big four firm told me that brands, too, were increasingly asking for “face only” content, meaning they would only work with influencers who appear personally on camera.
It is easy to track a more performative, almost cartoonish style emerging and intensifying. Among the most successful of these figures is south London influencer Jon the Food Don, who has more than half a million followers on TikTok and mainly reviews chicken shops. Jon’s patented bit is leaping up and running from the restaurant in excitement when he eats a particularly good dish, camera bouncing like the chaotic backstage handycam footage of a WWE production. Like many of the new wave of influencers, he is playing a character; he called it “a more animated version of my younger self” when I spoke to him. But his approach is, he said, a combination of his interpretation of the desires of the audience and algorithm, and also a reaction to what he found to be a stultifying landscape, where most influencers looked and sounded the same and rarely offered their own opinion.
In May, I attended several restaurant openings to get a feel for influencers in the wild. The most illuminating was a party for the 280-seat second London location of the Latin-American restaurant Tigermilk. There was a fountain and a mariachi band. There were 18 influencers present, but as one of the attenders put it, they were “baby influencers” – all had under 50,000 followers. Here were the next generation of hopefuls, buzzing with excitement over a glitzy PR invite and a free meal. A young man named Ryan Ewhare – who was seated in a corner table with a phone rig, shooting front-facing content – told me he had studied the greats, especially Inskip, to learn about timing and angles. He has only 2,000 followers so far, but he has a natural charisma and posts at least once a day. He already has an agent. A woman named Crystal Wong, closer to my own age of 40, has the unbeatable gimmick of bringing her family to restaurants. They milled about together, cross-posting to each other’s accounts, searching for the most glamorous light, the best wall-hanging plants, and avoiding the band. They were having fun.
Over the next few days I saw their content roll in on my feed: instant coverage and hundreds of thousands of views. What looks spontaneous to the viewer is in fact an out-of-the-box advertising solution that has become the industry standard. Some restaurateurs, such as Robin Gill of Darby’s, told me they reach out directly to influencers and work with ones they like. But most restaurants simply pay for a standard PR service for their establishment, which runs to about £3,000 to £6,000 a month for a medium-sized restaurant and climbs well abo
