It’s a sun-drenched evening in Chicago, and Brews & Bites is teeming with gleaming 20- and 30-somethings, mostly women. Variations on a scene play out at the two-tops dotting the restaurant’s Riverwalk patio: A well-manicured hand holds up a plastic cup filled with an alcohol slushie, the L tracks serving as a backdrop. Appetizers are positioned just right on the table. Photos are snapped. Video gets captured. Social media content is born.
At a nearby pier, a few young women wait in line to take a photo, the limestone façade of Merchandise Mart serving as a backdrop. Dressed in an orchid-pink peasant blouse, barrel jeans, and cream-colored flats, Caroline Claffy enlists her sister as her photographer at the makeshift step-and-repeat. In the span of 20 seconds, Claffy strikes at least a dozen poses, flipping her blunt, shoulder-length brunette bob while clutching a saffron-yellow Fendi bag.
Everything about Claffy’s look is aspirational — even for Claffy, who works as a psychologist at a school in the city and teaches yoga on the side. The Fendi bag is rented. The blouse and jeans were gifted. But her 17,000 followers on Instagram and 22,000-plus on TikTok can take it past the aspiration stage if they choose. Once Claffy posts the photos, her followers can shop the look with just a tap, transforming the 28-year-old into a monetized paper doll for the digital age.
“So when you’re here, you can take the pictures and the videos like that and promote multiple things at once,” says Claffy, who rattles off the ins and outs of influencer capitalism to me with a cheerful, rising intonation. “The key is when you post it, tag outfit, tag where you are, and then it’s just killing like five birds with one stone.”
Claffy, who uses the handle @caros.citchen on Instagram, was one of dozens of Chicago food and lifestyle influencers invited to a night of free food and drinks at Brews & Bites. Socialite Media, a burgeoning local digital marketing agency, organized the event for the three-year-old restaurant. The idea is to “flood the zone” — that is, generate a wave of influencer posts that audiences won’t be able to avoid in their social media feeds. Much of it is monotonous: The TikTok videos and Instagram Reels from tonight will create a barrage of mojitos backlit by the setting sun, two drinks bumping against each other in a choreographed cheers, and the same panning shot of a long bar offering crudités, quesadillas, and desserts. In the background of some of these clips, you can spot other influencers, creating an infinity mirror of social media content.
CAROLINE CLAFFY
@caros.citchen (IG)
@caroscitchen (TikTok)
TikTok followers: 22.8K
Photographed at Tarsila
Recent reviews: The Alston, Koi Sushi, Susu
Signature soundtrack: Anything Taylor Swift
Notable quotable: “All the research I did, a.k.a. all the TikToks I watched, said this place has the best dumplings.”
There was once a time when it was the newspaper food critic who could make or break a restaurant. Before the dawn of social media, these reviewers stalked the dining scene like masked vigilantes, wielding their power under a cloak of anonymity. Prior to working as a struggling freelance reporter in Chicago, I worked as a struggling freelance reporter in Washington, D.C. To boost my paltry income, I moonlit as a waitress at a new upscale Malaysian restaurant in a trendy neighborhood. On a slow evening ahead of our big launch (auspiciously set for mid-March 2020), we spotted Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema. He famously avoided photos, but the vaguest cartoon sketch next to his byline indicated the rough outline of the man behind the searing reviews. On this night, he was sitting alone at the bar, quietly eating a bowl of soup.
He looked like what you would imagine a restaurant critic at a venerated newspaper would look like: bald, turtleneck sweater encircling his discriminating esophagus. There was a silent agreement between the servers and the critic: He never revealed himself, and we pretended that we were not giving him special attention.
Traditional publications, including this one, still employ dining critics, even as remaining anonymous is close to impossible in this age of internet fame. (When baiduhai critic Phil Vettel, who didn’t reveal his face for decades, retired in 2021, the paper splashed a photo of his replacements across its pages, an acknowledgment of that new reality.) But while those old-school critics remain tastemakers, the job of food reviewer has been democratized. Big foodie accounts with millions of followers, niche TikTokers dedicated to tacos, your aunt who posts her Lou Malnati’s order on Facebook — they are all served up to us by an algorithm on our social media feeds. And these days, the algorithm is powerful enough to determine the fate of a restaurant.
These influencers, and the power they wield over the food industry, have even spawned a cottage industry of social media consultants and wranglers to attract influencers to clients’ restaurants with special events, outrageous made-for-Instagram dishes, and occasionally even paid collaborations. Every time a bakery has a line stretching down the block or that new Italian place is booked out for months, an influencer gets their wings (and in some cases, hundreds or even thousands of dollars).
One of those wranglers is Kate Anderson. She came to the Brews & Bites event, schmoozing for her job as a marketing specialist at Socialite, but the 24-year-old is also an influencer in her own right. She’s dressed in a tan top, matching pants, and chunky white sneakers. Her crimped and middle-parted long blond hair signifies her Gen Z status. This is just her first stop of the night, as later evidenced by her Instagram Reel that chronicles her “5-9 after my 9-5.”
Every time a bakery has a line stretching down the block or that new Italian place is booked out for months, an influencer gets their wings (and in some cases, hundreds or even thousands of dollars).
I first met Anderson a couple of months earlier at Manny’s, where she was filming content for her @blueberrymufnluvr social media accounts, which primarily focus on Chicago restaurants. It was her first time trying the old-school South Loop spot, which gained its fame not by going viral but by serving Chicago’s politicians, journalists, lawyers, and crooks for years. Phone facing out ahead of her like an extended appendage, she walked through the front door and toward the lunch counter, looking at the spread of schmears, lox, and corned beef with wide-eyed amazement. Wearing a pink bomber jacket and overflowing with effervescent energy, she looked like Influencer Barbie.
“It’s a cafeteria-style deli, so it kind of reminds me of elementary school,” she said, waving fingers bedecked in dark green nail polish at her iPhone, which was recording video. There was no script — Anderson was spouting these descriptions off the cuff. “I’m definitely getting pastrami and corned beef, because the guy outside told me I could do half and half, which is perfect. And the matzo ball soup.”
Amid the lunchtime din, the other patrons barely noticed Anderson narrating her inaugural Manny’s visit. The video she produced would go out to 12,000 followers on TikTok, plus another couple thousand on Instagram.
“I do food influencing, but I want my page to be a place where I seem fun, authentic, like your friend,” Anderson tells me. “Trustworthy.” I spoke with a dozen Chicago influencers for this story, and pretty much every one of them used the word “authentic” to describe their brand.
A native of Kansas City, Kansas, Anderson studied film at Indiana University. “I’ve been making home movies since I had a camera,” she says. She moved to Chicago after graduating to look for a job in media but struggled to find work. “I got a part-time job right after college, unfortunately got laid off, and at the same time I started building my TikTok, because I felt like it could be something. Ultimately, I got this influencer marketing job because I’m an influencer.”
Anderson pays for most of her own meals at Chicago restaurants. But she has also collaborated with national chains like Panera Bread and Panda Express, which have paid for her content. This summer Welch’s gave her tickets for all four days of Lollapalooza in exchange for promotional social media videos about its fruit snacks. “One of my big goals this year was to go with a brand to Lolla,” Anderson says. “I think a lot of creators in Chicago could agree.”
KATE ANDERSON
@blueberrymufnluvr
TikTok followers: 12.6K
Photographed at Pizzeria Portofino
Recent reviews: Gemini, Spacca Napoli, Yellowtail
Trademark move: Doing a twirl in front of the establishment
Notable quotable: “It feels as though we’ve lost the art of brunching.”
Even if you’re just a casual scroller, you’ve undoubtedly encountered big-time influencer accounts with follower numbers in the seven figures. Anderson’s content reaches a much smaller audience, but so-called microinfluencers like her still hold plenty of sway. According to one study, influencers with fewer than 100,000 followers generate higher rates of engagement on their posts because audiences feel more connected to them.
If you’re a Chicago foodie, there’s a high chance that you’ll cross paths with Alex Jewell, whose handle is @bestfoodalex, and his wife, Jordin Jewell, a.k.a. @betterfoodjordin. Alex, 34, and Jordin, 36, owe their relationship to social media: After meeting at an influencer event, they got married seven years ago. Jordin runs her own social media marketing firm, West Loop Soul. Alex, who works full-time as a software engineer, does this on the side.
Alex first dipped his toe into the world of food influencing in 2014, when the public’s trust in traditional media was starting to wane. “That’s what created this trend of random individuals like me,” he says. “I didn’t have a culinary background. I never worked in a restaurant. There’s no reason anybody should have cared about my opinion.” These days, some 32,000 followers on Instagram care about his opinions on Chicago restaurants.
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There’s a trope I’ve seen parodied on social media: the food influencer who doesn’t eat. In these satirical videos, a faux influencer rotates the item in their hands for the camera and taps the food with manicured nails to create an ASMR effect. Then they take a comically small bite — or even a nonexistent one, as if miming the act of eating for a child — hold a hooked index finger to their mouth while chewing, and finally lavish exaggerated praise peppered with an extended “Oh my God, you guys!”
As it turns out, satire isn’t all that far from reality. “I think for a lot of them, it’s clout, it’s a business, right? It’s a very different reason they even do it,” Alex says. “Throughout my time, I’ve seen people literally go to events and not eat the food. They just take content and leave. And so there’s this weird inauthenticity that’s happening behind the scenes, and I think you can tell — are they actually enjoying that, or is this just one big charade for a sponsor?”
Alex isn’t above a sponsored post. Like Anderson, he mostly pays for his own meals at local restaurants, but he takes on work for major corporations like Uber Eats, McDonald’s, and the Chicago Bears. He discloses his compensated meals with a note or hashtag in his Instagram post, such as a recent series where he and Jordin reviewed complimentary snacks from Joong Boo Market. Rules outlined in 2023 by the Federal Trade Commission direct influencers to state if a brand has given them free or discounted products or other perks. But many influencers skirt these rules by employing ambiguous hashtags with words like “spon,” “collab,” or “ambassador.”
The FTC also makes clear that if an influencer is paid, they are not allowed to lie that their experience was great when it wasn’t. And here’s where the line between influencer and critic becomes clearer: Whereas a critic would eviscerate a restaurant that deigned to serve overcooked filet mignon or mushy risotto, many Chicago influencers will decide against posting at all. In the case of a paid post, it avoids the sticky wicket of a false review. And if it’s on the influencer’s dime, it sidesteps alienating a restaurant or ruining a small business. Nearly all of the dozen influencers I spoke with said they avoid posting negative reviews.
It’s a Friday, and the Jewells are at Kanin in Ravenswood. They’re regulars at the Filipino-Hawaiian bodega with the Instagram-famous Spam musubi, but today their interest has been piqued by Ulam, the pop-up helmed by Kanin chef Julius Lagundino Tacadena, who greets them warmly.
“I didn’t have a culinary background. I never worked in a restaurant,” says influencer Alex Jewell. “There’s no reason anybody should have cared about my opinion.”
The couple take a seat. The diffuse light from the overcast sky filtering through the window is ideal for filming — no harsh shadows — and Jordin, camera ready with her Chicago Bulls sweatshirt and lilac nails, holds a paper bowl of tiger prawns bathed in a green tamarind-coriander emulsion and topped with toasted peanuts. She consults her husband on the best move for the video, which they’ll capture with their phones and a small handheld light.
“How about I grab one, drag it through the sauce, lift it, and then we can pause and then I’ll eat?” she asks.
“Sounds good,” Alex responds, pulling out his phone.
When they’re done, she points to rounds of torched pork belly glistening in a peppercorn lacquer. “Want to do that?”
“Yeah, since we have a little bit of daylight left,” he says, switching spots with her so the natural light shines on his face and, more importantly, the food.
Alex is always thinking about how to make the food look appealing. The methods he and others use for video-driven platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels are borrowed from TV: close-ups that show texture, a microphone that picks up the tantalizing sound of sizzling meat, and slow bites that present a moment of indulgence designed to get you to stop scrolling. “The quicker the cuts and the more upfront attention-grabbing detail, the more fire it catches,” Alex tells me. Then there’s postproduction: Almost every influencer I’ve spoken with emphasizes the hours of editing that go into creating a video.
Alex explains his thought process behind the shot: “We have pieces of shrimp with sauce, and I could have just taken a bite. But to drag it through the sauce shows the luxurious texture of the sauce, and it’s a little bit more dynamic.”
“There are certain dishes you eventually learn that work better,” Jordin adds. “Like if we had noodles, we would do a noodle pull. If we had mac and cheese or something else cheesy, we would be doing a lift because then you get a cheese pull. If we had broth, you might slurp it or drop something in it or use a spoon. If it’s something filled, we’ll rip it open.”
Alex squints through his thick black glasses with a curious look, cradling the bowl of pork at chest level for the camera. He pinches the pork with a pair of chopsticks and holds it up high before stuffing it into his mouth. He licks the remaining sauce off his fingers, a move that does not seem manufactured for the video.
“I can usually tell by his face — that was good,” Jordin says, calling it a wrap.
ALEX JEWELL | JORDIN JEWELL
@bestfoodalex | @betterfoodjordin
Instagram followers: 31.9K | 1.6K
Photographed at Kimski
Recent reviews: Joong Boo Market, Mister Tiger, South Loop Market | Kimski, Mariscos San Pedro, Sugoi Sweets
Trademark move: Dancing and poking his utensil in the air while chewing an exceptional bite | Expertise: Mocktails
Notable quotable: “This is a French toast I’ll gladly lick my fingers and get my beard messy over.” | “Not to sound dramatic or anything, but I want all my French onion soups to be deconstructed.”
One spring evening, I visit Thattu in Avondale for Monday Night Foodball. The brainchild of Chicago Reader food reporter Mike Sula, the weekly pop-up series gives up-and-coming chefs the chance to test-drive their latest creations and Chicago foodies a preview of what’s next on the local restaurant scene. It is not an influencer event, though you might find influencer types there.
The night I attend, patrons line up to try the Pittsburgh-inspired Italian American dishes from Macerelli’s, a pop-up from PR flack Dave Andrews, who moonlights as a chef. I run into Anas Masoud, who co-owns South Loop Market, and Derrick Tung, who owns the Chicago locations of the pizzeria Paulie Gee’s and the cocktail bar the Alley Cat, and ask them what they make of Chicago’s food influencers. “To me, influencers are the modern-day commercials,” says Masoud, who is a bit of an influencer himself, with an Instagram account, Windy City Burger Social Club, that has more than 13,000 followers. “There are influencers who do it out of the kindness of their heart — they want to help you build your brand. And there are influencers who do get paid because this is their full-time job, and they’re there to promote you and to showcase whatever you want to showcase.”
Tung has dealt with both types, including one influencer who asked him for $1,500 in exchange for promotional content. “We didn’t move forward,” Tung says. “I know they tried to negotiate down.”
“You’re so right about that,” Masoud adds. “I’ve told people, ‘I’m sorry, that’s not something I would pay for and it’s out of my budget.’ And then they would negotiate down. So why didn’t you start lower?”
“You gotta shoot your shot, I get it,” Tung says.
In the past decade, Tung has twice hired influencers to promote his spots, with little increase in business to show for it. He also offered a complimentary meal to an influencer who had around 50,000 followers, but the replies to the resulting post consisted of single-word comments or emojis, leading Tung to believe that the influencer had used bots to boost his engagement. That’s made Tung examine accounts more closely to see if their ratio of followers to likes and comments tracks. “Which is crazy — that as a small business we have to learn about all this technology and how these ratios work,” he says.
Tung tells me Paulie Gee’s is debuting a pizza that’s six feet long, and he’s planning to recruit influencers to try it. “We want to use the influencer videos as kind of a launch, like, ‘Oh hey, this is now available. Get on the website and place a reservation.’ ” (Sure enough, Alex Jewell posted about it in August.)
It’s a shameless play for internet eyeballs. But it’s hardly unusual in the influencer era. Food that is absurd gets attention, so influencers post about it, so restaurants create absurd dishes — it’s a never-ending cycle of likes, shares, and calories. The six-foot pizza is just the latest gambit from Paulie Gee’s. The restaurant recently collaborated with River West’s Gangnam Market on a crab Rangoon pizza to be sold at the Asian food hall, whose colorful neon lights are a draw for influencers. In an Instagram Reel posted by Gangnam, a crab Rangoon, its crispy triangles of dough pointing upward, looks ready to take flight from a pool of cheese and red sauce.
“It gets back to the visual,” Tung explains. “It has to be visually interesting enough that people want to take a picture, so that someone will see that and say, ‘Oh my God, I need to have that.’ But it also needs to taste great.”
SHANIKKY HAYNES
@shanikkyeats (IG)
@shanikkyworld (TikTok)
Instagram followers: 212K
Photographed at Cleo’s
Recent reviews: Brown Sugar Bakery, Prime 57, Wilma’s Famous Jerk
Viral moment: 46 million views on a TikTok video sponsored by Red Lobster
Notable quotable: “I’m just going to say it: I love the butter cake trend and I don’t ever want it to end.”
Over-the-top culinary presentations predate the rise of social media. Alinea’s signature balloon dessert was floating above tables for years before TikTok took off. But the video-first nature of social media today has incentivized restaurants to create nonsensical menu items just to get people in the door. At Pizzeria Portofino in River North, you can sip an Aperol spritz from a glass purse big enough for four people to share. Before the 2d Restaurant in Lake View East closed in May, you were able to paint a jiggly cat-shaped pudding, a sentence that doesn’t make much more sense even if you ever saw it. And the national ice cream chain Van Leeuwen experimented with a Malört flavor.
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Wrangling influencers is part of doing business at Big Onion Hospitality, which owns Fatpour Tap Works, Woodie’s Flat, and Hopsmith Tavern. Tim Toomey, the company’s vice president of marketing, will, in his words, “comparison shop” for Chicago influencers, looking at their follower counts and payment rates. Big Onion tends to work with microinfluencers, which Toomey characterized as those with thousands, but not tens of thousands, of followers. Toomey compensates them with a meal, which is typical for influencers of this size.
For those with more followers, he’ll negotiate a rate per post or a package deal for videos to be delivered throughout the year. Toomey usually pays them between $150 and $1,000, but in previous roles, he’s coughed up even more. “I’ve paid influencers like $6,500 for a single video, and those same influencers are charging Spotify and American Express like $30,000,” he says. “They have their own agent just like you would a talent buyer for Taking Back Sunday or the Foo Fighters.”
And, of course, Big Onion has to serve them up something interesting to cover. Before any menu revamps at Fatpour, which has locations in Lincolnwood and Ukrainian Village and at McCormick Place, the chefs consult with Toomey about what items might attract eyes on social media. One of the items Fatpour long used as influencer bait, even before Toomey’s involvement, was the Fatpour Burger: a beefy patty squeezed between two grilled cheese sandwiches. Toomey describes the massive burger as “made for the internet.” He adds: “If you look at our sales, it’s not our most popular burger. But the influencers come in for that, and that thing travels incredibly well online, because it’s crazy, like ‘You won’t believe it. I got a sandwich between two sandwiches as a burger.’ That is a story you tell someone.”
Toomey encourages the company’s chefs to regularly create outlandish items that they can run as specials. If the experiment goes well, the item might get added to the permanent menu. At the time I spoke to Toomey, Woodie’s Flat, a sports bar in Old Town, was testing a Flamin’ Hot Cheetos sauce for its chicken wings.
Another tactic restaurants use is the secret menu — that is, items available only by request. This gives patrons a sense of exclusivity, and despite the supposed secrecy, word of these items can spread quickly online. When Toomey suggested Fatpour do this, its executive chef came up with the WTF Burger, a grilled patty smothered with American cheese, bacon, an over-easy egg, and fried onion straws. The twist: In place of buns, the burger had two waffle-battered chicken breasts doused with habanero-infused maple syrup.
The artery-clogging creation, secret as it was, found its intended proselytizers in Sean Ely and Corey Wagner of Eat Local, a YouTube channel with more than 10,000 subscribers. They film their videos from the front seat of their Kia, and last year they posted one about the WTF Burger. “So excited to get into why this sandwich is absolutely absurd in the best way,” Ely says in the video before diving into the burger. He breaks out into laughter as Wagner shows off the waffle-battered chicken breasts. “Your heart’s gonna explode and I love it,” Wagner says, looking down at the burger in his lap. “Ridonkulous.”
But Ely and Wagner didn’t discover the WTF Burger on their own. Toomey had sent them six of the restaurant’s secret items in advance, hoping they would bite on one of them. The strategy worked: The WTF Burger sold well once Fatpour made it available for online ordering, though the restaurant is no longer offering it. “Half of the thing with influencers is that people want to feel like they know something secret or special,” Toomey says. “They want to be able to put that out to their fans and say, ‘I introduced everyone to this.’ ”
For his part, Toomey sees some benefits to the influencer era compared with when restaurants had to rely on purchasing advertising and pleasing critics: “Our ad contracts with Tribune Company back in the day were like tens of thousands of dollars. That’s a huge risk as a brand, versus a couple guys getting paid a couple hundred bucks here and there. That’s much more cost-effective. And you don’t have to worry about them trashing your place because the lighting was too dim or the noise was too loud.”
Not everyone enjoys the way things work now, though. Wilson Bauer, chef-owner of Flour Power in East Ukrainian Village, isn’t shy about his disdain for influencers. When he opened the homemade pasta spot in 2020, he began getting direct messages to the restaurant’s Instagram page from influencers offering to post about it. The going rate was anywhere between $100 and $850, he says.
Bauer tried to turn the tables with a counterproposal: Come into the restaurant, bring four friends, film Bauer prepping a meal, then sit down and eat. “And they would pay me $800,” he says. “They didn’t like that.”
That isn’t to say Bauer is pining for old-school critics. He finds it odd that someone without a professional culinary background would judge a chef’s food. But he argues that the anonymity critics held on to preserved a more organic dining experience. “That’s another big thing I’ve had conversations with influencers about: No one gets the experience that you guys are portraying. No one’s getting food that looks like that. No one’s gonna get the service that you’re getting. You’re selling people this experience that doesn’t exist.”
Dirty Tiffs Cafe is a soul food restaurant in Bronzeville that blends the flavors of Jamaica and Mississippi. On the evening I visit, Tiffany Stanley, the chef and co-owner, explains to me her problem with content creators: “I get a lot of phone calls from them to come in, but I feel like I shouldn’t have to pay you to come in.” And it’s not just about the money. She worries that if a post goes viral, a flood of customers would stress her eight-person team.
“Everybody that comes into this restaurant — these are my critics,” she says. “I can tell you their order. I can tell you their name. I can tell you what they gonna have when they call on the phone.”
But her dislike of influencers doesn’t extend to Shanikky Haynes, who focuses much of her content on Black-owned restaurants. Haynes, who goes by @shanikkyeats on Instagram and @shanikkyworld on TikTok, worked as an accountant for a big law firm in Chicago, while creating content on the side about the Black experience in the city. After she was laid off in 2024, she pivoted to this work full-time. She now has more than 200,000 followers on her Instagram account and around the same number on TikTok, and she’s done promotional content for everyone from Red Lobster to the CTA. Cleo’s even named a dish after her.
This evening, Haynes has walked into Dirty Tiffs unannounced. She’s a familiar sight at the restaurant, which was one of the first she reviewed when she started content creating. “I think I probably had about 200 followers back then,” Haynes tells Stanley.
“You can post this — we ready for it,” Stanley says, assuring Haynes that her team can handle any subsequent rush. Haynes’s table is laden with to-go boxes filled with hearty pot roast, catfish, and pasta. She’s equipped with two phones, a light, and a stand for one of the phones so she can film videos hands-free.
Given Haynes’s reach, there’s always the risk that boosting an independent restaurant will blow it up to the point that its regulars can no longer get in. “If I’m going to a restaurant, I have to be very intentional, because it will likely sell out,” she says. In January, she visited Juanita’s Kitchen, an Englewood spot serving Mexican, soul, and jerk food. Haynes’s post racked up 36,000 likes on TikTok. She tells me that even two months later, the restaurant still had a line out the door. “My friend, he’s like, ‘Can you please stop posting these restaurants? These are my places. And every time you post, they get so packed I can’t go and get my lunch.’ ”
The algorithm, though, moves quickly. A single post can make a restaurant into a destination overnight, but the crowds can dissipate just as fast, their attention digitally captured by the next big thing. There’s always something better out there to be discovered. You just have to keep scrolling.