More Than the Menu: Restaurant Recommendations in the Age of Micro-Influencers
New York is a foodie’s playground, but a playground that can quickly become tiring to play on because of the immense number of restaurants in the city. Old standbys like Time Out, Grub Street, and the New York Times food section all offer recommendations, but with so many outlets competing for readers’ attention, sifting through these curated lists can feel like navigating a maze. Now there are still more options for more specialized curation: hyper-specific, algorithm-driven platforms that deliver niche recommendations tailored to an individual consumer’s preferences for cuisine, neighborhood, and even aesthetic and feel. Young New Yorkers, more chronically online than ever, are turning to Instagram and TikTok accounts to find the best spots for boozy brunches with friends, dinner with your parents when they come to visit, and drinks with a first date.
While bona fide food critics might remain the tastemakers for an older, more established crowd, influencers — and more specifically micro-influencers — hold this power for the younger set. Status, prestige, and exclusivity matter little to a generation searching for more than just what’s on the menu; they are looking for spots where they can find community. Lovebites, an online food & drink catalog that crowdsources recommendations via open submission, has tapped into this recommendation fatigue. Operating primarily through their Instagram page, Lovebites contends on their website that “recommendations are better when you know who they came from.” Instead of churning out endless lists of restaurants, each Lovebites post is a curation of go-to spots deemed worthy of patronage by a New Yorker, mostly young twenty-somethings. Each post includes a photo of the contributor and a list of recommendations for a range of categories like where to go when you’re hungover, where to go if your direct deposit just hit (or if you’re still waiting on that next paycheck), where to go if you’re starting a night out, and even where to go if you want to fall in love. Each submission serves as a stand-alone guide, a curated look at the New York food and drink scene. Many of the contributors are micro-influencers — social media personalities with smaller followings and fewer paid partnerships than traditional influencers, but who, because of their relative lack of celebrity, are able to maintain a higher degree of interaction with and relatability to their followers. They possess the magic mix of being cool enough to be aspirational figures, but real enough that their followers know they too are navigating the grueling and exhilarating experience of navigating your young adulthood in one of the most overwhelming places in the world. For a generation that wants to romanticize what they can and suck the marrow out of every experience, Lovebites offers up recommendations that reflect a mood, a vibe, a feeling even. “Someone felt enough magic at a place that they feel the need to share it with me,” says Melissa Gagliardi, a contributor to LoveBites. “There’s nothing more kinetic than that. I want to feel what you’re feeling!” She appreciates reviews that drill down into unusual subjects, like the people who work there. “What place has a staff that will match my mood so I can have a cozy encounter?” she says. “Where can I walk into and feel like they can match my energy?”
Ella Kahan is one of the co-founders of Chew York City, another popular New York food recommendation outlet based primarily on TikTok and Instagram. “TikTok [is] a great thing because you can convey the overall experience and get an idea of the ambiance and feel,” she says. Social media lets micro-influencers translate the ethos of an establishment into a review that can pull audiences into the restaurant before they set foot in the physical location for the first time, making the formerly intangible tangible. And seeing their favorite micro-influencer have a meaningful night out allows viewers to project themselves into not just the restaurant itself but into the sense of community that micro-influencers advertise; you too can live this cool, glamorous, picture-perfect but still messy enough to be relatable life! While the quality of the menu is still a key component, younger New Yorkers are in search of the full experience, a key that unlocks the door to a certain lifestyle. And they trust their own peers more than a food critic to point them in the right direction.
